What makes something scholarly?
Unlike "popular" journal literature, which is written for the general public or for the particular group that the writer represents, scholarly literature is written by people with expertise in a particular subject. These experts usually have academic credentials (advanced degrees in a particular area) and the articles are often published in "peer-reviewed" (reviewed by experts in the field) journals.
Why Can't I Just Google it?
1. You wouldn't find most of the relevant scholarly resources that you have available to you as a result of being a Rutgers student and
2. You would need to take time to evaluate what you do find to determine if is something that you can use in an academic paper.
So I Can't Use What I Find on the Web?
There's a lot of great stuff on the Web; and a lot of inappropriate-for-research stuff as well. So you would have to take the time to figure out in what category the information you found might be. The Library at the University of California at Berkeley has a nice guide laying out what you would need to consider:
You can also take a look at this brief tutorial from the University of Maryland on Evaluating Web Sites
And for an acronym that you might remember, see: The CRAAP Test
Indexes and Databases
Looking for articles that specifically focus on literature?
- Literature Resource Center
- A full-text database of literary resources including biographical material, essays, articles, and excerpts from larger works. Searchable by author, title, genre, literary movement, and theme. A good place to start your research! Rutgers-restricted Access.
- MLA International Bibliography 1926-
- The premier index to articles, books, and dissertations on literature, language, linguistics, folklore, and film. Rutgers-restricted Access
How about articles with a biomedical focus?
- PubMed: Bioethics
- Search a subset of millions of citations in PubMed, the biomedical database, that have been automatically formulated to limit results to discussions of bioethics.
Want to expand the range of disciplines that you're searching? Here are some multidisciplinary databases
- Academic Search Premier
- A basic multidisciplinary database, ASP indexes both news magazines (Time back to 1929, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report) and scholarly journals. Especially strong for arts and humanities titles; also good resource for book reviews. Rutgers-restricted Access
- ProQuest Social Sciences Premium Collection
- Index to over 10,000 social science titles, including journal articles, books, dissertations, proceedings, and government publications; full-text access to over 1800 journals. International and interdisciplinary in scope. (Rutgers-restricted Access)
Full Text Not Attached?
Not all databases have all the articles they cite available in full text. Use the 
button that's in the database article record to have the system search Rutgers subscriptions for the full-text article.
Article Not Available/Only Available in Print?
If the Rutgers Libraries don't have the article (don't subscribe to the journal/don't have that issue), or only have a copy in print format, you can use Article Delivery Services to request electronic delivery of the article. If you're linking from one of our databases, we'll even automatically fill you the form for you!
Subject Guide
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