In social and behavioral sciences databases, you'll find different types of research articles. When you search OneSearch for books and articles in the library catalog, you'll also find news and magazine articles about psychology. When you use Google, you'll also find websites and blogs, reports, studies and government documents.
On this page we briefly cover:
Word Cloud attribution: Ben Taylor, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
When you're ready, use the Evaluating Sources tab (above) on this research guide for help determining whether you've found a high quality source that's appropriate for a college level paper or project.
The first type of article is the original research study. These report findings interesting to a particular research area or field. Researchers will report the methods and theories researchers used to arrive at those findings, including limitations to their research experiences.
For more information on locating Original Research Studies, use the Find Scholarly Articles tab on this guide and/or watch a video demonstration.
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Book reviews are also popular in research journals. And you can find experts reviewing books, sometimes chapter by chapter, with great attention to how the book connects to the current literature in particular research area. Ask a librarian if you'd help locating the book that's being reviewed.
Example:
Similar to newspaper/magazine article, blogs often talk about important studies or ideas. Sometimes the author is a professional researcher or scholar (you can look them up with a quick Google search if you're unsure). If the author of the blog is an expert in their field or discipline, it should be relatively easy to find a longer, more in-depth version of their work - perhaps in a book or research study - using OneSearch or Google.
Blogs can be long or short, but generally they don't provide enough quite information about the research you're interested in, and they don't generally include citations for their sources. Once again, if you'd like help finding the author's full study, report or experiment being reported on, feel free to reach out to a librarian.
Can you cite the blog? Yes, you may quote or cite a blog written by someone who is an expert in the field. However, a blog, which is usually written in the first person (I, me, etc.), wouldn't be considered a scholarly or academic source like a peer reviewed journal article.
There are many blogs specific to psychology. For example:
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When you're ready, use the Evaluating Sources tab (above) on this research guide for help determining whether you've found a high quality source that's appropriate for a college level paper or project. Or as always, reach out to a Librarian for more help!
A second type of article is a review article. Review articles selectively review important studies, methods and theories relevant to particular research or discipline. There is also a kind of review article, called a systematic review, which analyzes the effectiveness of a statistical measures in a particular research area of sub-discipline. This can be quantitative or qualitative in nature. Lastly, there is the literature review article, which provides an overview of previous research on a topic that critically evaluates, classifies, and compares what has already been published on a particular topic. You will find all types of review articles in library article databases.
Here are some additional instructions for finding a specific type of review article from within a library database.
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The key difference between literature review and systematic review is that a literature review is an overview of current knowledge and theories of a specific topic, whereas systematic review is a type of review that uses analytical methods to collect and analyze secondary data.
It's common to find newspaper or magazine articles on the web and in library databases about a particular psychological study that's been recently published. These are not peer reviewed research articles, so while you can read them and cite them in your paper - they are often legitimate, credible sources - they often do not "count" as the scholarly sources your instructor is looking for. For example, this article, from Science Daily:
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What next? If the study being reported on interests you, you'll want to look for the full article that describes the study being summarized by the news or magazine article. Just type the title of the study into OneSearch or Google. Didn't find it? Ask a librarian for help.
How to tell the difference? Find this full resource here:
https://www.skylinecollege.edu/library/informationliteracy/evaluatingsources/magazinesvsjournals.php
Not sure where to start?
