Barton College Library Limiting Index Searches to Only Academic Journals or Magazines Page

After doing a search in an index, limit your results to those articles coming from only academic journals (also known as peer-reviewed, refereed, or scholarly journals) by clicking on the "Academic Journals" link on the Results page, as illustrated in red in the following screen shot:

The results list should then be reduced to those articles that come from academic journals only.

'Warning' icon Warning: Limiting to results from academic (peer-reviewed or refereed) journals does not eliminate retrieval of items like book reviews, news stories, and editorials contained within those journals. Book reviews, news stories, and editorials are not considered peer-reviewed, scholarly, or journal articles even though they appear in peer-reviewed or refereed journals, and they are not accepted as such by instructors. For more information about how to differentiate between true journal articles and magazine and newspaper articles, see our help page.

Another Way to Limit to Articles from Journals

The synonyms peer-reviewed, scholarly, and refereed are associated with the editorial process of many journals. Because neither magazines nor newspapers use this process, these interchangeable terms can be used to eliminate magazine and newspaper articles and retain only scholarly journals from a search results list.

Note: Depending on the database you are searching, you may have to use either one or the other of these synonymous terms. For example,

databases provided by the vendor EBSCOhost use the designation "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed)"

other databases may use the designation "refereed"

as illustrated in the example below:

Example: Limiting to Journals: Using "Peer-Reviewed" or "Scholarly"

To limit a search to peer-reviewed or scholarly journals in EBSCOhost's Academic Search Premier database,

Click on the "Refine Search" tab, then

In the "Limit your results" section, click in the "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals" box--highlighted in blue below--to place a check mark, as pictured in the following screen:

Screen shot demonstrating how to limit a search to journals in the Academic Search Premier database

Doing so will retain only journals and eliminate any magazines retrieved during a search. (See our Warning about the limitations of this kind of search.)

Limiting Results to Magazine Articles Only

After doing a search in an index, limit your results to those articles coming from only magazines by clicking on the "Magazines" link on the Results page, as illustrated in red in the following screen shot:

Screen shot of 'Magazine' link to limit results to those from magazines

The results list should then be reduced to those articles that come from magazines only.

Limiting Results to Newspaper Articles Only

After doing a search in an index, limit your results to those articles coming from only newspapers by clicking on the "Magazines" link on the Results page, as illustrated in red in the following screen shot:

Screen shot of 'Newspapers' link to limit results to those from newspapers

The results list should then be reduced to those articles that come from magazines only.

For more information on other differences between journal and magazine articles, see our Scholarly Journal Articles v. Magazine Articles page.

Last updated May 25, 2006

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