Journal Articles

Although books are the dominant form of scholarship in the humanities, articles are also extremely valuable, especially those appearing in scholarly journals.

Many assignments require students to limit their search to scholarly or peer-reviewed articles. "Peer-reviewed," "scholarly," "academic," and "refereed" are often used interchangeably to describe manuscripts that underwent expert review before publication. For more information, watch our video, "Magazines vs. Scholarly Journals."

Many databases, even general ones such as Ebsco Academic Search Complete and ProQuest Central, allow you to limit your search to peer-reviewed publications.

Book Chapters

Not all books contain a unified narrative from the beginning to the end of the text. Some are collections of essays, with each chapter having a unique title and author(s). These works share features with both books and journals. Like a book—unlike a journal—there is more lag time before publication. However, like a journal—unlike a book—library catalogs often do not list the titles and authors of every chapter, and researchers must use databases and indexes to search for them.

Try these resources for locating journal articles and book chapters.

Hint: Most searchers rely exclusively on keywords to retrieve records in online databases. If you wish to retrieve more precise results, try searching by controlled vocabulary for your topic, often referred to as "subjects" or "descriptors."