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Student Research Guide

If you are working on a project or paper, this guide will introduce you to the essential tools and resources for any assignment.

What is Peer-Reviewed?

Scholarly journals published by professional associations or a university press will have a panel of scholars who evaluate articles submitted for publication. In other words, these editorial panels are comprised of the author's peers.

If an article is approved for publication the panel has agreed that the article will advance the thinking within the discipline. Thus, articles accepted for publication would then be considered peer reviewed.

Where is that article anyway?

Use the databases shown here to find references to articles about your topic.

To get to the full-text of the article, click on the  button next to the reference. 

No  button? Some databases, instead, show their own links to the html or pdf versions.

If there are no links (and no ), then copy down the bibliographic information (author, journal title, year, volume, pages) and search our journals to see if we have a print version of the journal.

If we don't have access to an article,  you can request a copy through Interlibrary Loan.

Locating Databases

To select a database, select the Databases tab and then search alphabetically by title or by subject area:

Multi-disciplinary Databases

Library article databases are indexes that allow users to search for articles from various publications and/or periodicals (journals, newspapers, or magazines). Some databases are multidisciplinary and cover a wide variety of topics.  Other databases are specialized and focus on particular subjects or disciplines, such as psychology, education, history, business, etc.

The description of an article found in a database commonly consists of 3 main parts: 

Citation - gives the publication information for the article or book chapter including author, title, periodical name, issue, date, and pages numbers.
Abstract - A brief summary of an article or book.
Full-text – when available, the complete copy of the article.

Some frequently used multi-disciplinary databases include: