There are several types of databases suitable for searching for information as part of your education. Below is an overview of the main categories to help you make this choice.
Catalogs
A catalog is basically an inventory of the materials a library owns. The advantage a catalog therefore is that you can read everything you find with the catalog. In fact, this is not always the case with subject-specific databases and citation databases.
The University of Amsterdam's library catalog is called CatalogPlus. This contains not only books but also online journal articles, which are tailored to UvA education and research. So these sources will often be scholarly, but keep in mind that this is not always true. Not everything that is interesting for teaching and research is always scholarly.
Subject-specific databases
These databases are also called bibliographies because they contain a collection of literature on a particular subject. For example, PsycINFO is a database that specializes in the area of behavior and Sociological Abstracts contains mostly articles from sociology and related sciences such as anthropology. In CatalogPlus, you can see what databases exist in your field.
The quality of the literature in these databases is generally good. Social science databases contain almost only scholarly literature, and almost all of them have the ability to search only for peer-reviewed publications. Subject-specific databases are also very useful if you are in the process of orienting yourself to a new subject, especially if you are in the process of coming up with search terms, because these databases contain subject terminology and subject-specific keywords.
Citation databases
The final category of databases that is interesting to search in are citation databases such as Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. When you look up an article in these databases, you can see how often and by whom the article is cited. This is also called citation tracking. It is also possible in Web of Science and Scopus to filter by number of citations so you can quickly see who the most influential authors are on a particular topic.
Journals that are in Web of Science and Scopus are always peer reviewed. This is because they are only included in these databases if they are influential (meaning articles from these journals are, on average, highly cited). This is not the case with Google Scholar, so here you will have to pay even closer attention to whether the sources you find are also of sufficient quality.