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English Composition 3: English Composition, Rhetoric, and Language

Scholarly v. Popular

Los Angeles Public Library

Not all articles are available in databases that UCLA subscribes to. The Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) has over 250 databases available to anyone with an LAPL library card. You can get an ECARD online-no need to go to a library. 

The most useful database to try searching is Research Library (ProQuest), which UCLA does not subscribe to. It has some online journals not at UCLA. 

Find Articles

These are general databases that are useful for lower-division research papers. They contain articles in scholarly journals, newspapers, and popular publications. If you want to look for others, go to this page to browse databases by subject. Click through to your discipline (political science, sociology, history, etc.). Here you will find a selection of the most useful databases for each discipline listed.

                 Get it at UC              is your link to full-text! Note that some sources only index journal articles—they don't actually have the full text.

For more tips, see our guide on database searching.


The databases listed below are for newspapers. For more news sources, see the News research guide.

Using Subject Terms

Many databases will assign subject terms to each article. These subject terms are like tags: if you click on one, then the database will search for all articles tagged with that term. This can be helpful if a subject term is slightly different than your keywords. For example, a keyword search for "urban gardens" leads to an article tagged with these terms:

Clicking on "URBAN agriculture" leads to a whole different set of articles, and clicking on "GARDENS" will broaden the search from community gardens to gardening in general.

Note, though, that you'll want to start with a good keyword to find your first set of articles. For more on choosing keywords, see our video tutorial!