- Borrowing
Scholarly articles published in reputable journals are highly focussed and written by experts for other experts in the field. They either report on primary research done by the scientists themselves, or provide a review and evaluation of the research in a given area (systematic review or meta-analysis).
Below are the research databases we recommend for starting your scholarly article search.
Remember: It's good research strategy to do your searches in MORE THAN ONE database.
To browse the more than 200 databases the library subscribes to, please visit our Research database page.
Current scholarly articles from many areas of science and ebooks published from 2017-2021.
A library database provides access to the contents of thousands of scholarly journals newspapers, and trade publications, sometimes covering a particular discipline or sometimes multi-disciplinary in scope.
Better than a Google search, databases come with tools that help you refine your search to get more relevant results, as well as links to related articles. In most cases, you can be confident that the articles you find will be credible sources to incorporate into your writing.
Here is an introduction to searching Academic Search Complete, one of the library's largest, multi-disciplinary databases. Although the interface is somewhat different than the databases in the "Best bets" listed on the tab to the left, the method of searching and the tools will be similar.
Key features of most databases:
Google Scholar is a search engine that covers much of the scholarly, peer reviewed literature from academic publishers, plus conferences, theses and dissertations, abstracts and more. Some of the content is available full text, and some will be citation-only.
You can configure your settings to include links to articles available from Kwantlen Polytechnic Library subscription journals to avoid hitting publishers' paywalls. See the screenshot below.
Don't forget about Open Access journals. These are scholarly, peer reviewed journals available for free (they do not require a KPU login).
For more information about Open Access journals, please visit the Open Access Publishing page on our Research, Scholarship, and Publishing at KPU guide.
Here are some of the important Open Access journal collections for Biology. Use the links below, or simply do a Google search for them. Keep these in mind for when you are no longer affiliated with KPU, but want access to quality, scientific literature.
You may also need to access information from trade or professional organizations. This kind of source is often evidence-based, but written by professionals for other professionals within a given industry, so the information tends to have a more applied or practical focus.
Need a visual to compare scholarly, trade and popular magazines? This chart points out some quick tips for making that decision.
The library subscribes to several trade and professional magazines in print as well as online. You will find the print collection organized alphabetically by title in the journal section of the library stacks. Print magazines are available to borrow.
Here are just a few:
If you want to know whether the library subscribes to a particular journal or magazine, use the journal titles search tab on the library home page to check. You will find both print and online holdings information in the search results.
Here is a quick KPU Library video on how to do this.
This kind of research article is among the most reliable sources of information you can find. And the most rigorous among these are systematic reviews and meta-analyses which comprehensively review and summarize all past articles published on a particular area of research.
Peer-reviewed articles are also how researchers communicate their findings, and verify, disprove, or build upon the research of others.
This video will give you a quick introduction to the peer-reviewed process.
In a database you can often filter results to "peer reviewed" or "scholarly", but maybe the search tool you are using doesn't have that option; or maybe Google Scholar is telling you it is scholarly, but you aren't sure...
The following KPU Library video explains the purpose and features of a scholarly journal article.
The quickest way to see if the library has access to an article is to copy and paste the full title into Summon search.
1. Put the title in quotations marks so that it will be searched as a complete phrase, rather than all of the words separately. Run the search.
2. Next, select Scholarly and Peer-Review articles from the content filter on the left hand side of the results. This is to ensure you are just getting the article itself, and not something about the article.
3. The article you are looking for should be at the top of the results list because Summon will put the most relevant articles at the top.
4. Double check using the authors' names: are the authors of your article the same as the ones listed?
Need a journal that isn't in our collection? If you are looking for a particular article in that journal, you can place an interlibrary loan. The Library can usually email it to you within a few days.