Finding sources - SLS 1501 - Strategies for Success in College - UCF Research Guides at University of Central Florida Libraries

Best Bets for Locating Scholarly Articles

For many of your assignments, your professors will be asking you to locate articles from scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. Here are a few places to begin your search.

PrimoSearch This link opens in a new window
Primo Search searches a variety of source types and is a good place to begin your research. If you are only looking for scholarly journals, be sure to click the "Scholarly Journals/Peer-Reviewed" search box to limit your results.
The previous discovery service at UCF was QuickSearch. The previous name for QuickSearch was OneSearch.
Academic Search Premier (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new window
This database provides access to both scholarly and popular sources on a broad range of topics.
ERIC (EBSCOhost) (1966+) This link opens in a new window
ERIC is the go-to database for Education Research. It indexes several different types of sources. You can use the search features to limit your results to scholarly journals.
ERIC is available from several database vendors, including ProQuest. UCF students are advised to use ERIC in EBSCOhost, which provides many links to full text and allows users to search multiple education databases simultaneously. Users who are not UCF students are advised to use ERIC from DOE because no login is required.
APA PsycInfo (EBSCOhost) (1887+) This link opens in a new window
The APA PsycInfo® database, American Psychological Association’s (APA) renowned resource for abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, is the largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. It contains records and summaries dating as far back as the 1600s with one of the highest DOI matching rates in the publishing industry. Journal coverage, which spans from the 1800s to the present, includes international material selected from periodicals in dozens of languages.
"contains approximately 3 million citations and summaries dating as far back as the 1600s with DOIs for over 1.4 million records. Ninety-eight percent of the covered material is peer-reviewed. The database also includes information about the psychological aspects of related fields such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, technology, linguistics, anthropology, business, law and others. Journal coverage, which spans from the1800s to present, includes international material selected from around 2,500 periodicals in dozens of languages."
Psychological Abstracts:
* 1927-1947 Microfilm BF1.P65
* 1948-2004 print in remote storage
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
This provides another way to access scholarly sources. Make sure to link your search to your UCF account to ensure full access to resources.
Use Google Scholar as a first step of discovery, but then focus your research by using specific databases relevant to your subject discipline.

Using ERIC to find scholarly, peer-reviewed articles

ERIC indexes a variety of types of sources, including many educational documents. To ensure that you locate only scholarly, peer-reviewed articles from the last ten years, be sure to enter a date range, click the "Scholarly-Peer Reviewed" box, and select "Journal Article (EJ)" in the "Journal or Document" box.

Tips on How to Select & Read a Research Article

Need a little help figuring out how to find a relevant article and understand the different parts of that article? Check out this "Structure of a Research Article" video below.