PTA-221 Project

You are required to use 2-3 peer reviewed articles for this assignment. Peer reviewed articles are written by experts, for experts, and are reviewed by experts. They contain highly specialized, discipline-specific language, often feature lots of statistics, charts, and graphs, have a formal structure indicated by headings (e.g. Introduction, Methods), and have citations and references to other scholarly literature. Compare this popular article about electrical stimulation with a scholarly article on the same topic to see the differences between the two types of articles. The sources you cite for this assignment should all look similar to the second link, but never the first! Please see our Evaluating Information Sources handout to learn more about the features of various sources.

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) is 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 under the "Refine Results" heading. 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 or PubMed (see the dedicated "PubMed" tab for tips on searching this resource), 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.

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.