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PTA Orientation

Many of your assignments require the use of scholarly, peer-reviewed articles. These articles are written by experts, for experts, and are reviewed by experts and include features distinguishing them from traditional magazine and newspaper articles, including:

  • Statistical analyses, with corresponding charts and graphs
  • An extensive bibliography of referenced works
  • Extremely technical, discipline-specific language
  • Standardized headings such as Introduction, Methods, and Conclusion
  • Narrow topics investigated with considerable depth
  • Highly credentialed authors, usually with a terminal degree (PhD, MD, etc...)

Please compare this scholarly article about yoga with this non-scholarly article published in Scientific American and notice the stark differences in language and audience. Refer to our Evaluating Information Sources handout for additional information and contact me or the reference librarian on duty if you have reservations about whether a given source is scholarly.

Database searching tips

1. Use limiters! Most of our journal article databases allow you to choose your date range and limit to scholarly/peer-reviewed articles on the initial search screen! See this screenshot of an EBSCO database's Basic Search screen for the location of those limiters.

2. Also use subject headings! A general keyword search (the words you type into a Google or database search bar) are only looking for instances of that keyword somewhere within the result. Searching with subject headings returns results only about that specific subject. Subject headings are readily available on the left-hand side of most search results screens. See this screenshot to learn the location of subject headings in EBSCO database search results (you will need to scroll down the page to find them when doing your own searches).

3. You are required to use a DOI in your citations (digital object identifier) if one is available. These are found within the bibliographic information in an article entry, as shown in the following screenshot: location of DOI in EBSCO articles. (Note: Citations for articles found on the open web without a DOI must include the direct URL to the article at the end).

4. Only certain CCC databases will consistently return scholarly health-related articles, so take care to limit your searches to:

OneSearch also houses scholarly articles from all library databases, but can also overwhelm you with results and potentially deprive you of powerful features available within the individual databases. It is strongly recommended that you begin your scholarly searches with either Academic Search Complete or Health Source: Nursing/Academic, as both are EBSCO databases that contain many potentially useful scholarly medical titles.

Unpaywall

If you are searching for a scholarly article on the internet (which you should only do with your instructor's permission), the Chrome extension Unpaywall can save you a lot of time by searching the open internet for a free, full-text copy. To use Unpaywall, perform a Google search for your article title and navigate to either PubMed or the journal's dedicated web site for the article (these should be among the top results). If a free copy is available, you will see a green lock icon (Unpaywall icon) appear on the right-hand side of the screen. Clicking on that lock will take you to a copy of that article.

If you have installed Unpaywall, try testing it out with this PubMed article entry.