- Borrowing
Scientific articles published in scholarly journals are highly focussed and written by researchers for other researchers and experts in the field. They either report on primary research the authors have done themselves, or provide a review and evaluation of the body of work done in a given area (systematic review or meta-analysis).
The following databases are the most recommended for starting your 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 offers you, please visit our Research database page.
Current scholarly articles from many areas of science and ebooks published from 2017-2021.
A collection of peer-reviewed images and factsheets pertaining to plant diseases and pests. You are permitted to use these resources in your peronsl and educational works, with citations.
A library database provides access to the contents of thousands of scholarly journals, sometimes covering a particular discipline or sometimes multi-disciplinary in scope, meaning they may cover many subject areas.
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.
Key features of most databases:
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 "Best bets" listed on the tab to the left, the method of searching and the tools will be similar.
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.
Finding articles that cite each other is sometimes called "citation tracking" and is a good strategy for finding out what researchers are saying about a topic. Once you have found an article that is relevant to your research, there are several tools that will help you find additional ones.
Search Google Scholar for your article. Below the article, you will see a link to Cited by and the number of times the article has been cited by others. In other words, this feature pulls together all of the articles that make reference to your article, giving you an idea of how other researchers have used this publication. Clicking the link will take you to all of those sources.
The number of times an article has been cited by others MAY be an indication of its impact on a topic, but realize that for very recent articles, there may not be many publications that have cited it yet. Make note of when your article was published.
Next to Cited by is a link to Related articles. These are articles that Google Scholar is suggesting may be of interest to your, based on its internal algorithms.
Be sure to set your library links to Kwantlen Polytechnic University Library in Google Scholar settings so that you'll have full text access to articles within the library's collection. See this KPU Library FAQ for how to do this.
In Summon, look for a similar feature below the items in your search results. Cited by brings you articles within Summon that cite your article. Cites brings you the articles referenced in your article that are indexed by Summon. The Related articles feature which will provide you additional articles related to your first one.
Most of the library's article databases have similar features. Terminology varies, but look for Times cited, Cited by, Recommended articles and so on for additional ways to locate relevant articles.
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.