Peer-Reviewed (Scholarly) Articles

Quick Links: Selecting Keywords Databases What is a Scholarly Article? How to Read a Scholarly Article

Selecting Keywords

Depending on what keywords you use, your results can be very different. Before beginning your search, brainstorm some of the words that might help you find the resources you need for your project.

      1. Express your topic in a topic sentence:  “Do violent video games have an effect on children?”
      2. Generate keyword search terms by identifying the main ideas or concepts within that topic sentence:  “Do violent video games have an effect on children?” = Violence, video games, effect, and children.
      3. If you don’t find the results you need with your first keywords, try brainstorming related terms or synonyms for the keywords you first identified:   
        • violence–> aggressive, aggression, violent
        • video games–>MMO, RPG, RTS, MMPORG
        • effect–>influence
        • children–>adolescents, teens, toddlers, youth, young people

Databases
Many people utilize library databases to find academic resources. To locate resources through the Munday Library, you can either use the search bar on our homepage, or go to a specific database such as the ones listed below:

  • Social Science Premium Collection – ProQuest provides a range of full-text and index resources across social science disciplines. It serves researchers across regions, markets, and disciplines with high quality titles from around the world. The Social Science Premium Collection provides abstracts, indexing, and full-text coverage of journal articles, books, dissertations, and more, including over 2,400 full-text titles.
  • EBSCO Databases – Using this link, you can search all EBSCO databases that contain resources on psychology, counseling, health/medicine, neuroscience, and other social science disciplines. Simply enter your search terms in the box at the top left of the page.
  • JSTOR – Provides core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences from the earliest issues to within a few years of current publication. Users may browse by journal title or discipline, or may search the full-text or citations/abstracts.
  • Springer eBook Collection – Full text access in HTML and PDF formats to the electronic versions of books published by Springer. Content is in 13 subject areas: Architecture and Design; Behavioral Science; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Business and Economics; Chemistry and Materials Science; Computer Science; Earth and Environmental Science; Engineering; Humanities, Social Sciences and Law; Mathematics and Statistics; Medicine; Physics and Astronomy; and Professional Computing & Web Design.
  • HeinOnline Government, Politics and Law for Academics – Database of legal resources, including laws, regulations, some trials and court reports, treaties, monographs, and a variety of other materials covering United States and foreign law. Coverage includes private and public international law, intellectual property and legal history.
  • Fuente Académica Premier – Fuente Academica is a collection of scholarly journals from Latin America, Portugal and Spain, covering all major subject areas and designed to make academic research readily accessible in PDF format.
  • ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) ICPSR advances and expands social and behavioral research, by providing data stewardship and a data archive, including specialized collections in education and criminal justice.

What is a journal and a peer-reviewed (scholarly) article?

Not sure what a journal article is? What does peer-reviewed or scholarly mean?

 

If you are having trouble identifying whether an article is considered scholarly or not, this FAQ page can offer some tips on how to tell if a resource is scholarly, authoritative, or popular.

How to Read a Scholarly Article

The length and format of scholarly articles can sometimes feel overwhelming if you are not familiar with their format; this video provides some quick tips on how to navigate scholarly articles for your research: