Articles are smaller in scope than books and can therefore focus on more particular aspects of a given topic. Since articles are faster to produce and publish, the most up-to-date research often appears in this form.
Articles in scholarly journals are peer-reviewed—that is to say, they have gone through an anonymous formal vetting and editing process—whereas articles in magazines or newspapers are accepted at the discretion of a single editor
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. However it is not complete and does NOT search all of the Library's databases.
To do a comprehensive search, use the databases in your subject area, e.g. MLA.
Google Scholar searches for scholarly materials including journal articles, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Because of the variety of sources that Google Scholar uses, not every result you’ll see is necessarily peer-reviewed. It is still important to evaluate the sources for credibility
Enabling the Get it @ Queen's links
On campus: access to Queen's resources is available via Google Scholar.
Off-campus: access Google Scholar through the Queen's Library link where you will have to enter your NetID and password or if you go to Google Scholar directly (https://scholar.google.ca) you will need to configure your Google Scholar preferences to allow automatic access to our Library subscriptions to journals and databases.
Scholar Preferences
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Click on the Settings "gear" located in the upper right hand corner of the Google Scholar search page to view Scholar Preferences (choose Library Links and add Queen's University, Kingston - Get it at Queen's). Click Save.
Omni
Omni is the library’s search engine, which enables a simultaneous search of many of the library’s online collections from a single search box.
It can be a good starting point to find material but if you are doing high level research, you will want to search relevant subject specific databases.
Look it Up
To find journal articles by title, you can use Summon. Type the title of the article in the search box. Remember to add quotations to search for the title as a phrase. For example:
Miller, Adam: "Ann Radcliffe's Scientific Romance" Eighteenth-Century Fiction, (28:3), 2016, 527-545.
Articles are important in your research as they contain the most-up-to-date research in a given field and often focus on a particular aspect of a topic.
But not all journal articles will be useful for your essay so you will need to evaluate before you use them.
Consult our guide, Distinguishing Scholarly from Non Scholarly Periodicals, to discover the difference.
