Start With These Databases
- CINAHL Plus with Full TextScholarly articles and other publications on nursing, biomedicine, and consumer health.
- MEDLINE with Full TextIndex to scholarly journal articles on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and more.
- PubMedA service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, PubMed includes over 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.
Some Additional Useful Databases
- Alt-HealthWatchFull text articles, reports, conference proceedings, pamphlets and newsletters dealing with complementary and alternative medicine, including holistic and integrated approaches to health care and wellness.
- Consumer Health CompleteProvides access to easily understandable health and medical information. Updated in 2022 with additional ebooks and encyclopedias, animations, pamphlets, and health reports, along with a new interface providing advanced search, browse, save, and export options.
- Health Source: Consumer EditionThe full text of a range of consumer health magazines, pamphlets, and reference books covering consumer health topics such as food sciences and nutrition, children's health, women's health, sports medicine, and general health. Also includes thousands of Clinical Reference Systems reports.
- Health Source: Nursing/Academic EditionFull text for hundreds of scholarly journals focusing on many medical disciplines, with a particular focus on nursing and allied health.
- Natural & Alternative TreatmentsThis database contains detailed information on hundreds of different conditions and the conventional and natural treatments used to treat them, herbs and supplements, plus drug-herb and drug-supplement interactions for a range of drug categories.
- PsycINFO 1887-CurrentThe premier index to journal articles and other scholarly publications in the field of psychology.
- SciFinderSciFinder provides access to the world's most comprehensive and authoritative source of references, substances, and reactions in chemistry and related sciences. It includes the Chemical Abstracts database, which contains references to millions of journal articles and related documents. Users can search by chemical substance or reaction, research topic, author, or specific CA or patent reference.
All users must register for an account using their official BGSU email address.
Peer Review in 3 Minutes
This video is published under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA US license.
Is It a Scholarly Journal?
Journals and Magazines: This guide details the characteristics of each category.
Cabells Directories: Can be consulted to identify an appropriate journal to send a manuscript for publication. Also lists elements of peer review, and publication details. Covers journals in business, education, health sciences, psychology and computer science.
Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory: Entries include information about whether the journal or magazine is a scholarly journal, consumer magazine, etc.
Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences. This database of author instructions for more than 3,500 periodicals will frequently say if the periodical is peer-reviewed.
Research Databases: Some allow you to limit your search to scholarly journals. CINAHL allows you to limit your search to peer reviewed journals and indicates that an article is peer reviewed in the Journal Subset field when appropriate. MEDLINE has indexed only scholarly journals since 1975.
Popular vs. Scholarly
Created by Suffolk County Community College.
Parts of a scholarly journal article
This video is from Bowman Library at Menlo College.