Guides: Online Articles Search: Start Searching

Start your Online Articles search on the Libraries homepage. Find the Start Your Research section and select the Online Articles tab.

Notice that your search is limited to peer-reviewed (see definition on right) and full-text, online articles.
Enter two or more keywords from your research question in the search box - see the Prepare to Search tab for tips on selecting keywords.
Online Articles automatically looks for all of the words and puts those articles at the top of the results list.

Browse your results to see whether your search is returning relevant articles for your research topic.

The articles come up in Relevance order and can be changed to other option at the top left.
To read the abstract (or summary) of an article, click on the Preview link at the bottom of the entry.
Look at the number of articles in the Results list. If you only need 3 to 5 articles, you want to end up with 30 to 50 articles in your results. In this example where over 1000 articles were retrieved, the search would need to be refined. For thesis or dissertation research, you want to aim for at least 50 to 100 articles in your results.

What is Peer Review?

Many instructors require you to use peer-reviewed sources for your papers and projects, but what does that mean?

Peer review is the process of having experts in a field review the quality of an article or book before it is published
Most articles in scholarly and academic journals are peer-reviewed
Books published by university or academic presses are peer-reviewed

Most databases allow you to limit your search to peer-reviewed articles. Here are two examples:

Academic search complete
Check the "Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals" box under "Limit Your Results"
Research library
Select "peer-reviewed" beneath the search box.

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