Find items in UIC Library collections, including books, articles, databases and more.
Find items on the UIC Library website, including research guides, help articles, events and website pages.
Unlike primary sources such as newspapers, diaries or photographs which offer firsthand accounts of historical events, secondary sources synthesize primary sources and other documents. They provide an analysis of a topic from the point of view of a scholar. Typically, scholarly journal articles on historical topics are written by historians with substantial training and expertise.
Scholarly journal articles are useful. They offer other historians' opinions about your topic. And their footnotes and bibliographies can help you find primary sources or other secondary sources.
Sometimes scholarly journals are difficult to understand. They are written by scholars for other scholars. They often use specialized and unfamiliar terms to talk about their topics, and their authors usually assume the readers know a lot about the topic already.
Nevertheless, scholarly journals can open up your understanding of a topic. We've recommended a few options for finding scholarly articles below.
History Day students will need staff assistance to access these resources. They can be accessed only from computers at UIC Library.
America: History and Life provides articles on the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present.
Searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Digitized back issues of scholarly journals with a rolling date of five years ago. Covers a wide variety of disciplines.
Database Searching Tips:
The Chicago Public Library also provides a number of useful databases for finding articles that are available to anyone with a library card. Once you have a library card, you can search the databases below--and more--from anywhere by simply entering your library card number. Get a Chicago Public Library card.
See the list of History & Social Sciences online resources on the Chicago Public Library website. This page also contains information on how to apply for an ecard for access to CPL's online resources (must be 14 or older or apply, or registered by a parent or guardian).