Why can’t I just search Google or Google Scholar for articles? What does Peer Review or Refereed or Scholarly Article mean? Also: Open Access?

This video has a really good explanation of why ONLY searching Google or Google Scholar is not the best idea when you are looking for scholarly articles.

• Short reason: Copyright issues
• Slightly longer explanation: You will miss out on a lot of stuff that is either: not indexed by Google because the publisher said NO!, OR it is indexed by Google but the publisher wants $$ to let you read it.
• Longer explanation: Watch the video below.

If you just want to jump to the explanation of what exactly is a scholarly article (also called peer-reviewed or refereed) watch 0:23-1:00 of the video below.

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

After watching this video you might say: Wait! This video seems to be implying that the current way of publishing scholarly articles is not the best! Everything should be publicly indexed and available and I should be able to use Google Scholar or some other index to find and read articles! And I would agree with you, that is what it is arguing, but we are so far from that, so for now, use the library databases.

Sometimes you are just not sure how a journal is classified,and you want to double check what kind of journal it is (popular, trade, scholarly, etc) .

• Here are some ways to tell if an article is popular or scholarly from UTAustin.
• You can also use the Ulrichsweb database to find that information. Search for the journal by title and the results will tell you how that journal is classified (is it peer reviewed or not)