Looking for peer-reviewed or scholarly articles?
The Library's Summon search, and most databases, have a content filter you can use to limit your searches to this kind of information.
Begin your search with a few keywords related to your topic in Summon search or a library database, and use quotation marks around terms that you want to search as a phrase, for example, "food security" and college students.
In Summon, use the Scholarly & Peer Review Articles filter to ensure that your results are all peer-reviewed articles.
In databases such as Academic Search Complete that have a variety of content types, look for the Peer Reviewed filter.
These features do a pretty good job of reducing your results to the kind of information you need, but it is still a good idea to verify that your article is in fact coming from an academic journal and will have gone through a process of peer review.
Not sure how to tell if something is scholarly or peer reviewed?
See the Scholarly Publications chart for a quick comparison of scholarly peer reviewed articles, trade publications, and mainstream popular sources.
Watch the Scholarly Journal Articles video below to learn about the peer review process and how to identify this type of article in your searches.