How to find journal articles
Most of your research at NDNU will involve articles published in scholarly journals.
Find them through our library databases!
Get started with the Discovery bar
When you search with the Discovery search bar on the Library's home page, you'll see results from several of our biggest, interdisciplinary databases. This is a great way to get an idea of what kind of research is available when you're just getting started with a project.
...or search one database at a time
On the A–Z Databases list, you'll find short descriptions of each database to help you decide which one to choose. This is a great way to find research from just one field of study.
Check our our subject research guides for recommended databases
for research in , , and .
Wait, what's a peer-reviewed journal article?
Articles published in journals or periodicals are how scholars and researchers communicate with each other about what's happening in their field—what new discoveries have been made, who is developing new questions and ideas, and how this emerging knowledge might affect the broader public.
Many scholarly journals only publish articles that are peer-reviewed, meaning that they have been rigorously reviewed and revised by a team of anonymous experts in the field who vouch for the article's quality. Peer review is not a perfect system, and all articles and research projects have their own limitations, but you can generally trust information in a peer-reviewed article in a scholarly journal that you find through an academic database.
Journals and periodicals usually go to print several times a year, so they often include more recent information than books (which take longer to publish). This makes journal articles a great source of information for your coursework, helping ensure that your own scholarly writing is up to date and relevant.
How do I tell if an article has been peer-reviewed?
If you've found a good article but aren't sure if it went through the peer review process, search on Google for the name of the journal the article was published in. The journal's webpage (usually on a publisher or university website) will have information about whether it is a peer-reviewed publication.
When you're searching through the Gellert Library's databases, you can use filters to narrow your search to include only peer-reviewed articles.​
What's the difference between "scholarly" and "peer-reviewed" journals?
Journals might be described as "scholarly," "peer-reviewed," or both. Both types of journals are meant for use by academics, scholars, and experts in a given field, but they differ in their focuses and methods. A journal is scholarly if it is written for an audience of academics and experts. Peer review is the anonymous vetting process that research articles go through before they are published in a journal. Scholarly journals might or might not have a peer review process; if they don't, their editors (instead of a group of anonymous peer reviewers) make the publishing decisions.
All peer-reviewed journals are scholarly, but not all scholarly journals are peer-reviewed. You'll find both articles from both types of journals through the Gellert Library's databases.
You can add filters from your results list, too!
How do I figure out what to search for?
Searching in our scholarly databases is different than using a search engine like Google. Check out our recommended search strategies to learn how to search efficiently and find articles you'll actually use.