Finding Nursing Journals

You are required to use peer-reviewed articles for your research assignments. Peer-reviewed (also known as scholarly) articles are written on very narrow topics by experts, for experts, and are reviewed by experts and include the following features:

         -highly technical, discipline-specific, and complex language 

         -lots of references, charts, graphs, and statistics

         -original research

         -highly qualified authors (advanced degrees, affiliation with research institution, etc.)

         -organized structure (abstract, introduction, methods, conclusion, references, etc.)

Please compare this scholarly article about yoga with this non-scholarly article published in Scientific American and notice the stark differences in language, layout, 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. 

Below is a screenshot of the first page of an article in the scholarly journal Clinical Toxicology. Notice the highly specific article title, university affiliations listed under the authors, and abstract. If you have a journal article and it does not contain the elements included on this page, please contact your instructor or ask a librarian for guidance on whether it is actually a peer-reviewed article.