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The Family and Marriage Research Guide

Suggested Databases

Start your search with one of the databases below. They allow you to search thousands of scholarly journal articles , conference papers and other similar research documents by keywords, author or other criteria.

Search Tips

Search Tips

  • Enter each search term or concept in its own box. You are using the 'and' connector to find articles with each of those terms.
  • Quotation marks searches the database for those words together as a term, such as "minimum wage".
  • An asterisk (*) searches the database for that word plus any variants of the root word. For example, work* will search for work, worker, workforce, and workplace. 
  • Use the OR between words to search for synonyms, such as "low income" OR poverty.
  • Use the limits to filter for a particular source type, such as peer reviewed journals
  • To refine by method enter terms such as quantitative, qualitative or empirical. Note: This method doesn't always work because these descriptors need to be listed in the article's record or abstract in order for them to appear on your results list.  

View more search tips and videos on the Research Help Tutorials tab on the guide.

What is a Scholarly Article?

What is a scholarly article?

Many professors require students to cite scholarly journal articles in their research papers. Scholarly journals contain articles written by scholars for scholars. Articles are reviewed by other scholars before they are published. This is called peer review.  

Many databases allow you to restrict your searches to scholarly journals, sometimes called "refereed" or "peer reviewed" journals.

Types of scholarly articles

There are two different kinds of scholarly articles researchers cite frequently in their work.  

  • Research or empirical articles present the findings from a specific study.  They typically start with a review of the literature and a description of how the study contributes our knowledge of the subject.  They then describe their research methods (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed) and present their findings. 
  • Review articles summarize the research being done on a particular topic and/or the theoretical approaches commonly taken.  They will reference many research articles recently published on a topic.  Review articles are a great place to start if you want to learn more about research in the field! 

Google Scholar

You can access library resources by searching Google Scholar!

If you are on-campus and using either the Internet Explorer or Firefox browser, you will be automatically recognized as a member of the A&M-SA community. If you are off-campus or using the Google Chrome browser while on-campus, you will need to configure the settings for Google Scholar so that it knows you are a member of the A&M-SA community. Please see How to Set Up Google Scholar for Off-Campus Use for instructions.

Please keep in mind that not everything available through your library is cited on Google Scholar, so be sure to also use the library's online databases for your research needs. You can also ask your subject librarian for help!

You will need to enter your A&M-SA network username and password to get into the library's databases from off-campus. If you need assistance with this, please visit our Off-Campus Access page.