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:
PsycInfo is a good place to start searching! This database contains scholarly journals in Psychology that publish empirical research articles.
Peer-reviewed articles are:
Identify your concepts
When searching for a topic, first it's best to break it up into keywords according to the main concepts.
For example, if you're interested in the impact of social media on loneliness in teenagers, your keywords might be:
Generate more keywords
Next, you should think about other keywords that might also describe your topic. This helps make sure you don't miss relevant articles.
For example: teenagers could also be adolescents, young adults
Combine keywords to narrow or expand
Next, you can use the drop-downs with AND, OR, and NOT to tell the database to include or exclude various terms.
Social media AND loneliness will only retrieve articles with both terms, which creates a narrower search:
Teenagers OR adolescents will retrieve articles with either term, or both, which creates a broader search:
Finally, you can use the Thesaurus to look up Subject Terms and add them to your search. PsycINFO will also suggest Subject Terms if you toggle that option before searching:
Methodology filter
On the Advanced Search page, you can scroll down to Methodology and select EMPIRICAL STUDY to narrow your search:
