Finding Peer-Reviewed Articles

Peer-reviewed journal articles are the most reliable source of scientific information. However, you will not have much luck finding them based on a standard web search. Fortunately, the UCSB library has an excellent collection of online and print resources to help you find peer-reviewed literature.

General Databases

If you are looking for articles from the past 20 years, and have some keywords or author names to search on, then you want to go to the online article databases. Your first stop should often be Web of Science, which is the database with the most comprehensive coverage in natural and social science combined. Choose "Full Search", then "General Search", and then you are presented with search fields to fill in. You can then look at the abstracts of the matching documents to see whether they are relevant.

Another general database is Current Contents.

Web of Science and Current Contents may give you a lot of stuff you are not interested in, however, and even their advanced search features are not all that powerful. Therefore, you may want to also look in some of the specialized article databases.

Specialized Article Databases

There are dozens of these, mostly grouped by topic; here is a complete list of the ones the library subscribes to. There are two reasons to use a specialized database:

1. You are less likely to get extraneous results; many of these databases also have more sophisticated search capabilities.
2. Some of these databases add information. For example, Biosis edits the abstract and keywords to ensure that the species names and study locations are included.

Here are some of the databases that you are most likely to find useful:

• Agricola (agriculture)
• Biosis (biology)
• Computer Database
• Econlit (economics)
• Environmental Sciences & Pollution Management
• Sociological Abstracts
• Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Finding Older Articles

Most of the above databases only have coverage back to the 1970's at best. At JSTOR, a few hundred top journals have been digitized back to their inception. Relevant to us, they have good coverage of business, ecology, economics, politcal science, and sociology. Unlike the other databases, you can do a keyword search on the entire text of the article, not just the abstract.

Moving Beyond Keywords

Even the best keyword search won't find you everything that's relevant to your topic. The other way to expand your search is to find articles that are linked through citation to a paper that you've already found.

1. Articles that the paper cites. This is easy: the information that you need is in the References or Literature Cited section of the paper.
2. Articles that cite the paper. Go back to Web of Science, and find the paper. On the main page for that paper (the one that displays the abstract), there will be a link that says "Times cited". Clicking this link will bring up a list of all the articles that cite the paper; some of them may be relevant. You can also click the "Find related records" button; this will show all the articles that have some of the same citations as the paper you already have.

Getting the Full Text

Now you have a list of articles and their abstracts, how do you get the full text of the article? If it's a recent article in a major journal, then it is probably available online: go to the UCSB Electronic Journals page to find the link if it's available. You will also find links to the individual journals on JSTOR here, if your article is older.

If the journal is not available electronically, or you are looking for an older article, then you'll have to hoof it over to the library and photocopy it. First, though, you should check whether the library has it, using Pegasus (this is also where you search for other library holdings). Use "Title Keyword" or "Title Begins With..." as your search field. If the library has it, it should appear on the search list; click on the link to go to the main page for the holding. Then click on the link to the right of "Call Number" to find out which volumes the library actually has and where they are.

• Current issues are on a set of shelves near the main photocopy area on the second floor, organized by call number.
• Older issues are bound and shelved with the books, by call number.
• Very old issues are often in the "Annex" (an off-campus storage facility). This will be indicated on the holdings web page; click on the "request" link and it will be delivered to the library to pick up.

If the library doesn't have the journal at all, or not the volume that you need, then you can request the article through interlibrary loan.