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Women's Health Project

Scholarly articles

You may use peer-reviewed journal articles for your assignment. Peer-reviewed (also known as scholarly) articles are written on very narrow topics by experts, for experts, and are reviewed by experts and feature highly technical language, lots of references, charts, graphs, and statistics. 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.

Tips

Database searching tips

1. Use limiters! Most of our journal article databases allow you to choose your date range (remember, no articles older than 7 years) 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. Use the "custom range" option if you want to narrow your results down to precisely the last 7 years.

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 can be found on the search results page by clicking the "Subjects authority" link on the left-hand side of the page. Type your term into the search box and use the "Add to search" button to add any relevant subject headings to your search.

3. You are required to use a DOI in your citations (digital object identifier) if one is available. If your article has a DOI, it will be the second-to-last entry under the "Additional information" heading.

4. Limit your article searches to the databases listed below, all of which contain peer-reviewed articles. If you are unable to find scholarly articles on your topic in CCC databases, contact me at cstrausberg@carrollcc.edu.