BEHS 210: Introduction to Social Sciences

For the most part, you'll be finding and using scholarly articles (also sometimes called peer-reviewed articles) in your research projects in this class.

Scholarly articles are written by professional researchers--psychologists, sociologists, gerontologists, anthropologists, etc. Those professional researchers are frequently professors at universities. They are, obviously, experts in their field, and they write scholarly articles for other experts (and for college students like yourself!) to read.

Scholarly articles are different than articles you read in a newspaper or magazine. Scholarly articles are longer, more in-depth, and more complicated! They often focus on one very narrow aspect of a topic.

You can usually recognize a scholarly article by characteristics such as these:

• It's written in fairly technical language
  • Even the title will often sound technical, like: "Psychosocial Risk Behaviors in Mexican Young Women Experiencing Homelessness."
    • That just sounds different than a typical newspaper headline, like: "Homelessness Among Women Is on the Rise."
• A scholarly article is often written by more than one author--for example, a team of researchers working together at the same university.
• A scholarly article will almost always have many citations in the article and a fairly long list of references at the end.
• A scholarly article will frequently be pretty long--more than just one or two pages
• Many scholarly articles, where the authors actually performed a formal experiment, will have a structure and headings like this:
  • Introduction
  • Literature Review
  • Methods
  • Results
  • Discussion

When you've found a scholarly article that fits your topic, try not to be intimidated by it! Although it may be written in highly technical language, by experts for other experts, if you review the article carefully, you can almost always extract a few main ideas or facts from the article that you can then use in your research project.

Some library databases, like APA PsycInfo, SocINDEX with Full Text, and others, contain mostly scholarly articles. But whatever database you are using, you will usually see a checkbox allowing you to limit your search to Scholarly/Peer-reviewed articles only.