PSYC 220: Social Psychology

PsycInfo is a good place to start searching! This database contains scholarly journals in Psychology that publish empirical research articles.

These articles report original research or studies (actual observations or experiments), rather than theoretical developments or methodological approaches. You can identify them in several ways:

• keywords: look for “study,” “empirical,” or mentions of participants, observations, methods/measurements
• structure: usually includes introduction, methods, results, and discussion sections
• publication: should be in an academic or professional journal, rather than in popular magazines or newspapers

Peer-reviewed articles are:

• written by experts in the field
• assessed for validity and scholarly rigor by other experts in the field (peer review)
• published in scholarly journals

Methodology filter

On the Advanced Search page, you can scroll down to Methodology and select EMPIRICAL STUDY to narrow your search: