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Health 101 Signature Assignment

Scholarly articles

You must use 2 (and are permitted up to 3) peer-reviewed journal articles for your Signature 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 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.

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 rkrzanowski@carrollcc.edu or 410-386-8337.