Research Guides: Honors College: Finding Scholarly Sources

Introduction

Many of your instructors will require you to use scholarly or peer-reviewed sources in your research. Peer review is a process scholarly writing goes through prior to publication in which subject matter experts review and make suggestions for revision to ensure that the research meets rigorous standards for the field. Peer-reviewed research can come in the form of books or articles. Please see the resources below to see the different ways you can search for and access peer-reviewed sources.

Multidisciplinary Databases

If you're looking for scholarly journal articles across subject areas, the following databases are your best bet.

Scout
The University of Alabama's discovery service, searching content from hundreds of electronic databases, print resources from our library catalog, ebooks, videos, news and more.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely available scholarly search engine that allows you to search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles – from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
JSTOR
Images of the full text of many scholarly titles in a range of subject areas, including literature, biological sciences, economics, finance, and statistics. Search the archive or pull up a specific article. Artstor is now available on the JSTOR platform.
Project MUSE
Project MUSE provides full-text access scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. The database is a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and other university presses and not-for-profit publishers. Also included are the UPCC collections in Asian and Pacific Studies, and Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction.

Basic Searching in Scout (2025)

This video covers basic search procedures in Scout and some of Scout's most popular features.

Transcript

Advanced Searching in Scout 2025

This video covers some advanced search functions and concepts in Scout, UA Libraries' all-in-one discovery tool. Topics include advanced search fields, boolean operators, search modes, and limiters.

Transcript

Google Scholar

E-Books

The library provides access to thousands of electronic books in every discipline and subject area. There are multiple ways to view an e-book. You can access e-books via PDF or e-pub format in your web browser. Or you can check them out by downloading them to your computer or mobile device offline access.

You can also view e-books through various content providers below.

HathiTrust Digital Library

HathiTrust is a partnership of research institutions committed to digital preservation of the cultural record. The Digital Library provides access to public domain and some in-copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives. Materials are available to the extent permitted by copyright law.

HathiTrust catalog records are included in Scout, but not in the Libraries’ Catalog.
JSTOR eBooks

Books on the JSTOR platform. JSTOR provides images of the full text of many scholarly titles in a range of subject areas, including literature, biological sciences, economics, finance, statistics, and scholarship in the Spanish language. Search the archive or pull up a specific article.
ACLS Humanities E-Book

This comprehensive electronic library consists of scholarly and peer reviewed book in the humanities from the disciplines of law medicine, anthropology, history, and philosophy.
eBooks on EBSCOhost

A collection of scholarly ebooks from leading publishers in various subject areas.
ProQuest Ebook Central

A collection of scholarly ebooks from leading publishers in various subject areas.

Need a refresher on how to access and download e-books on your device? Watch the following tutorial on how to "check out" e-books using Adobe Digital Editions.