Popular or Scholarly?

Scholarly Journals are sometimes referred to as "academic" or "peer-reviewed." As college students, your professors will expect you to become familiar with the scholarly journals in your field. These publications generally:

• Are written by experts in their fields. The author's credentials such as their university affiliation should be on the article.
• Include a bibliography or works cited list.
• Have longer articles.
• Are published less frequently. Many scholarly journals are released quarterly.
• Include few if any advertisements.

Popular magazines generally:

• Are written by staff writers.
• Might mention sources, but do not include bibliographies.
• Are written for the general public.
• Include more pictures and advertisements.

Trade publications are a periodicals that are written for a profession audience with expertise in the field, but they do not include in depth articles with citations.

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Databases

Environment Complete: Ecology, pollution, urban planning, and related subjects; includes articles and book chapters. Some full-text available. Try these advanced research functions:

• After you complete a successful search, click on the orange square above the search box to be notified about new articles on this topic.
• If you want to find out where an author or article is cited, click on the "cited references" tab to do a search. Or, if you look at an article record, "cited references"might appear under the title.
• Use the "email" fuction to send an article to yourself. You will have the option of choosing a citation format such as APA, or MLA. This saves a lot of time when you are drafting your bibliography.

SAGE Premier: Full-text of 485 journals in Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science, Technology and Medicine. Note: This databases is not yet available off-campus.

JStor is a full-text archive of scholarly essays in a range of subjects. The archives will span every issue of a journal ever publised except the most current 2 to 5 years. This means that this is a good database for tracking the history of science, rather than current research.

Academic Search Premier is a good general database with a mix of scholarly and popular, full-text and abstracts. WilsonSelectPlus is another good general source and contains all full-text articles.

If you see the "find full text" box, it does not mean that the article is full-text in that database. Click on the box to find out if the NPU or other Illinois libraries own the journal, or if it is full-text in another database. It will also allow you to click on interlibrary loan. Just fill in your information and we will contact you when your article arrives.

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Resources at Other Libraries:

As a North Park student you have access to many other academic libraries as a visitor, or through interlibrary loan. Click here for a list of of institutions. If NPU does not have an item that you need, you can order it free of charge from another library. Click here to order a book or article.

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Need Help?

For more help go to the reference desk.  The desk is located on the right side as you come in.  The desk is staffed by librarians from 8am - 9pm on weekdays and most of the weekends.  The librarians' offices are located to the left behind the reference desk.

Click here to open a reference help ticket!

Reference Desk: x5247

Room 118 - Katie Maier-O'Shea, Head of Reference (x5582)

Room 116 - Laura Burt, Reference and Instruction (x5587)