Use the limiting features available in many databases to limit the results of your searches to scholarly peer-reviewed and to types of scholarly articles.
If you need to verify whether a specific journal is peer-reviewed or refereed, click on the title of the journal if it is a hyperlink and scroll to find more information about whether the journal is peer reviewed. You may also run a Google search with the title of the journal in quotes and the word Refereed or Peer Reviewed next to the quotes.
Use the thesauri available in many database to help with search terms.