Scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles are the most appropriate sources to use in academic papers and projects, and they will be the best sources for primary research.
A scholarly, peer-reviewed article is one that is published only after undergoing scrutiny by several scholars, called reviewers, in the author's discipline, e.g., chemistry, history, etc. The reviewers do not know the identity of the submitting author and the author, likewise, does not know the identity of the reviewers. This method insures that the results of the peer-review process are fair and impartial. The reviewers may choose to reject the article for publication or recommend that the article be published either with or without suggested changes.
Popular, non-peer-reviewed articles are ones that do not undergo academic scrutiny; these kinds of articles are generally found in news magazines like Time and National Geographic.
L'année philologique is the premier database for classical studies. It indexes over 1,500 international periodicals, published anthologies, and conference proceedings.
Search Tips:
Academic Search Complete is the library's general academic periodicals database and covers scholarly journals (and some popular magazines and news sources) in all academic disciplines, including history and religious studies. Much of the content in Academic Search Complete is available in full text with links to pdfs.
Search Tip: Limit your search to scholarly, peer-reviewed material
After you perform a search and get a results set, you can use the limit function to limit your results to "Scholary (Peer Reviewed) Journals" by checking the box in the panel on the left-hand side of the screen:
Many items in your results list will have links to the full text. Look for the links to pdf or html full text, or a link to the content in JSTOR. If no full text exists in the Academic Search Complete database, click on the 
button/link to find out if the article is in full text in another database.
JSTOR contains full text of both journal articles and books. See these tips for making the most effective use of JSTOR to discover journal articles and books or book chapters on your topic:
1. Try using the FIELDS to limit your search terms. If you do not use the fields to limit your search, JSTOR will look for your search terms anywhere in the full text of the article. (Sometimes this is helpful, but most of the time, it results in too many irrelevant results.)
Tip: Think of synonyms and use the OR search operator to combine terms. Example: disease OR plague OR epidemic
Tip: Use the * as a truncation symbol to retrieve search terms with variant endings, for example: disease*
2. If you want to limit results to just articles or just books, after you see the results list, check one of the boxes to show a specific type of content:
3. After you see the results list, use the subject limit (on the left) to find content in a specific discipline: 
TOCS-IN provides the tables of contents of about 185 Classics, Near Eastern Studies, and Religion journals, as well as tables of contents from some monographs (essay collections, symposia, proceedings, etc.). It is worthwhile to check the box to search these collections because these book chapters are often not discoverable through traditional database searching.
To combine search terms in TOCS-IN, use the @ symbol. Example:
The results will simply be citations that match your keywords. The citations require some deciphering, however. The journal titles are abbreviated and you can find the full journal titles at the "Information on Tocs-In Journals" page. Here is a sample result showing the journal abbreviation:
Be sure to get the full journal name because you will need it if/when you request the item via interlibrary loan.
Also note that the numbers appearing after the journal abbreviation refer to the volume and issue number of the journal.
