Education Research Guide

Searching for Peer-Reviewed Articles: Start Here!

Let's Explore a Sample Database Search Using Education Source!

• Pretend topic: Use of social emotional learning strategies with older students
• What are the important topic words?
  • social emotional learning
  • "older" students     --What does this mean?
• To increase the chances the database will find articles relevant to our topic, are there other words that might mean the same thing or might be more descriptive?
  • Social emotional learning is sometimes referred to as SEL
  • Older students--> What grades or ages are being targeted?
• Important notes:
  • AND is understood by the database to mean both and, so it is a way to narrow a search
  • OR is understood by the database to mean either or, so it is a way to expand a search

You Could Enter the Search as Shown Below

• View the search and its results
• Depending on your assignment, there are additional steps that can be taken to refine the results list. See if you can figure out what they are!
• Instead of middle school OR high school OR junior high, we could have entered teenagers OR adolescents....
• For more guidance on database searching, see MIT Libraries Database Search Tips. The MIT guide explains truncation, field searching, search phrases, and keyword versus subject searching.

If you see this button while searching in one of our databases:

Click on the button and it will search within the library's databases to find the full text version of the article for you. If the full text version cannot be found, simply click on Request item via ILL and it will request the article for you through our Interlibrary Loan system, ILLiad. The article will then be emailed to your Jaguar account within a week or two.

Databases Covering Many Subjects, Including Education

• These can be great for finding research on interdisciplinary topics!
• Some have unique features like the ability to order results by the number of times an article has been cited by other scholars.

See a Full List of Available Databases

Why Does My Professor Require Peer Reviewed Sources?

Peer review is the rigorous process scholarly resources go through to become published. Most often when we talk about peer review, we are talking about journal articles going through the process, but some books do also. Peer review typically involves review boards of experts in a topic or discipline who read and evaluate submitted articles/materials to determine if they meet the standards for publication. This review involves more than just looking at the article's format, rather also examining thoroughness of the literature review, soundness of methodology, accuracy of results, and logic behind conclusions that are drawn. Often articles are returned to the authors for revisions before final publication.  

• For a clever video explanation of peer review, see NC State University Library's Peer Review in 3 Minutes (video)
• Remember that when using many library article databases, during your search you can limit your results to only Peer reviewed (Scholarly) articles by simply checking a box.