Get Help with any of the following:
Journal: Academic journals are periodicals with specific publication "mandates" - they publish articles in particular areas of study with broader or narrower scopes depending on the field.
Article: Academic articles are essentially papers of varying length written to address a very specific area of scholarship. They will either detail a study done by the author, review a variety of studies on the same or similar topics and draw conclusions from collating these articles, or similar.
Peer Review: In academia, peer review is the process by which articles submitted to journals are vetted for accuracy; after an article is submitted to a journal, a panel of (usually anonymous) reviewers will read the articles and provide notes for the author for editing before the article is published.
Open Access: Most academic scholarship is available only behind paywalls. Open access articles are usually paid for by the author(s) or funding institution(s) to be made available publicly, and will be printed in either open access journals or hybrid journals (journals which publish both open access and paid access articles).
Institutional Access: Institutional access is access to paid articles for students and faculty at an institution (like YU) via subscriptions, usually curated by the library.
Database: Databases make available collections of journals, usually organized thematically. In this way, they are like bigger versions of journals - for example, the database ERIC is a collection of journals that focus on education, while the database APA PsycArticles makes available journals with a psychology mandate. Some databases have broader scopes, like Academic Search Complete or ProQuest Central.
Vendor: Database vendors curate the selection of journals available in their databases and related subscription packages. For example, EBSCO is not a database, it is a database vendor, which makes available APA PsycArticles from the previous example!
YU's library subscribes to many databases to help provide students access to scholarly journals. You can view and access these databases below.
It is worth noting that due to the programs at YU, this guide focuses on papers published in the sciences and social sciences, with a focus on APA 7 standards.
