Soil & Crop Sciences Research Resources  Tags: agriculture natural_resources soils crops  

Use this tool to locate a specific journal, or to find an article if you have a complete citation.

I need to find scholarly/peer reviewed articles for my paper.

What are "scholarly" or "peer-reviewed" articles?

• Journal articles written by experts, faculty, or scholars on the topic
• The information has been evaluated by editors or other experts
• Articles most always contain a bibliography documenting sources

If you want to check to see if the journal is scholarly or peer-reviewed, search the journal title in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory.

Question: Is "Ecology" a scholarly/peer reviewed  journal?

If you look it up in Ulrich's, this is what you find...

Answer: Yes, Ecology is a refereed journal.

Do you have a DOI number for a journal citation?

If you do and it looks like this, 10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.29

Add this to the beginning of the DOI to make the DOI
searchable on the web, add:

http://dx.doi.org/

So this example would look like:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.29

check the link live

These quick tutorials show you tips for search strategies.

Below are the top ranked and most commonly used databases for this subject area. Most, but not all, of the articles in these databases are scholarly/peer reviewed.  For a complete list of databases, see the Find Electronic Resources & Databases page. You may also search by subject on the Databases page.

Searching in the research databases can be a bit tricky. If you keep a few tips in mind, you will create better search strategies.

Boolean logic or boolean searching (named after George Boole) uses logical words/terms (and  or not)  to combine words or terms.

Truncation symbols, usually the asterisk * symbol, give you extra searching options for the endings of words.

Wildcard symbols, usually the question mark ? symbol, replaces a letter or letters in the middle of a word.

Phrase searching, to keep words together as a phrase, you usually use the quote marks around the phrase "words together"

Boolean Examples

humpback chub AND colorado:  articles must have the words humpback chub and also the word colorado

humpback chub OR gila cypha:  articles may have EITHER the words humpback chub OR gila cypha

      IT is always a good idea to search for both the common name and the scientific name for an animal, plant, organism, etc.

dolphins NOT Miami: articles must have the word dolphins but CAN NOT have the word Miami (NOT is very powerful, be careful how it is used in your searches.)

Truncation Examples

wol*   searches for wolf, wolves, wolverine

agricultur*  searches for agriculture, agriculturally, agricultural

Wildcard Examples

wom?n  searches for woman or women

col?r  searches for color or colour

Phrase Examples

"global warming" keeps the words together so articles must have these two words side-by-side, global warming

Sometimes you may want to search for articles on a topic or subject, but also limit by journal. For example, you may just want articles about food webs in the journal: Ecological Monographs.

The search example below is from CAB Abstracts. To limit your search to journal articles from the journal: Ecological Monographs, you type in the journal name then in the right hand box, select SO Source

In Web of Science, the search looks very similar

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