How can I tell if an article is an original research study?
Many Psychology assignments require you to find original research studies. You can find original research study articles in library databases. These types of studies present research based on actual observations or experiments conducted by the author.
- Check the source: Study articles are usually found in scholarly journals, not magazines or newspapers.
- Read the abstract (summary): If it mentions any study, questionnaires, participants, or measurements that the author conducted, it is study article.
- Format: Many study articles are broken down into sections, such as "Methodology", "Results", and "Conclusion". Finding these or similar headings in an article is a good indication that it involves a study or experiment.
- Length: Study articles are usually very lenghty, at least 5 pages.
- References: Does the article have references listed at the end? Scholarly researchers have to cite their sources, just like you!
Search Subject Specific Databases
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Search citations/abstracts of journal articles, books, dissertations, reports in psychology and related fields via PsycINFO. Search full-text articles in general and specialized psychology via PsycArticles.
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button to find the full text of articles available at SU or to request from another library.
Use the links listed below to find even more articles on psychology topics.
- ScienceDirect College Edition This link opens in a new window
Includes online access to over 3,000 ejournals and 100 ebooks, primarily in the areas of health & life, physical sciences and social & behavioral sciences.
- ProQuest Central This link opens in a new windowThis is the largest single periodical resource available, bringing together complete databases across all major subject areas, including Business, Health and Medical, Social Sciences, Education, Science and Technology, and Humanities
- PubMED (MEDLINE) This link opens in a new windowPubMed comprises more than 22 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
- PTSDpubs (formerly known as PILOTS) This link opens in a new windowProduced by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD, this database provides citations and abstracts to the worldwide literature on PTSD and other psychological effects of trauma.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowJSTOR is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. JSTOR offers researchers the ability to retrieve high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. The journals archived in JSTOR span many disciplines. For more information about the JSTOR collections, please visit Currently Available Collections and Journals. Originally conceived as a project at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR began as an effort to ease the increasing problems faced by libraries seeking to provide adequate shelf space for the long runs of backfiles of scholarly journals. JSTOR is not a current issues database. Because of JSTOR's archival mission, there is a gap, typically from 1 to 5 years, between the most recently published journal issue and the back issues available in JSTOR.
- ERIC (ProQuest) This link opens in a new windowERIC covers 1966-present and includes abstracts of educational reports as recorded in the monthly Resources in Education; citations/abstracts for journal articles in the monthly Current Index to Journals in Education.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowGoogle Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
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