Google Scholar: Search engine for academic resources.
JSTOR: Electronic database that provides access to articles usually 3–5 years (the moving wall) behind the current issue.
Project Muse: Electronic database of current articles that includes more than 600 scholarly journals in the social sciences and humanities.
Nexis Uni: Electronic database, which is almost always full text and covers approximately 11,000 sources of news, business, legal, medical, and reference publications.
General Databases
In the social sciences, broad and commonly used databases and indexes are Academic OneFile (covering more than 8,000 journals); ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education and covers education and related issues; and JSTOR (short for “journal storage”), which is full text for more than 2,600 scholarly journals. What distinguishes JSTOR, as its name suggests, is that it provides back issues of journals, usually 3–5 years (described as a moving wall) behind the most current issue of a particular journal. Project Muse is an electronic source for current journals (greater than 600 scholarly journals in the social sciences and humanities).
Nexis Uni® is almost always full text and covers approximately 11,000 sources of news, business, legal, medical, and reference publications. Incorporating information from newspapers or other current periodicals may supplement academic sources. Another good source of news articles is ProQuest®, providing news information that ranges from the mid-18th century to the present. Statistics from newspapers or other sources may catch readers’ interest, but always question the accuracy of the information and the credentials of the author. If possible, confirm the accuracy of the information by checking it against primary and/or academic sources. A primary source is a source presenting original material (e.g., journal article), whereas a secondary source provides descriptions, summaries, analysis, commentary, perspectives, evaluation, or conclusions about the primary source material. A textbook is considered a secondary source.
Primary source: An original source (e.g., data collected for the project or existing sources such as census data) that was created during a particular time period and is used to draw conclusions based on that research.
Secondary source: A source that analyzes or critiques the primary sources. Textbooks, magazine articles or blogs summarizing research, systematic review articles, or handbooks on a topic are common secondary sources.
Peer review: Used in the context of academic work to indicate that a submitted work has been reviewed (usually anonymously) by experts knowledgeable in the field.
The Web and Peer Review
Remember that a general Google search is an avenue to explore research topics and keywords, but there is no peer review requirement for the material you find on the Web. Across disciplines, most published journal articles undergo a peer review. In this process, a manuscript submitted for publication without its identifying information (e.g., no author’s name or affiliation) is evaluated by other academics (i.e., reviewers) selected because they are knowledgeable about the topic. This process is supposed to lead to an unbiased evaluation of the article and ultimately to the publication of articles that are sound methodologically and contribute to the discipline. There is no “peer review” on the Web. For that reason, you have only your assessment of the work, which may not be sufficient to judge its quality. The topic of peer review is discussed in more depth later in the chapter.
Particular Kinds of Articles
Various types of research articles may be found, from those that provide overviews of a topic, such as review articles, to those that report primary research, where data have been collected. Another form of article, a meta-analysis, takes a statistical approach to combining the existing data from multiple studies on the same topic.
Review Articles
Review articles provide an overview and brief history of the topic and current challenges. For that reason, such articles are useful as you begin to develop a research question. Often these articles are labeled “Annual Review of _____.” Good sources of overview articles in psychology are Psychological Bulletin and the Annual Review of Psychology. Ask your reference librarian for publications that offer review articles in other areas of social science, such as sociology, human development, and anthropology.
Review articles: Provide an overview and brief history of a topic and its challenges.
Meta-Analyses: Their Special Value
A meta-analysis is sometimes referred to as a study of other people’s studies or “an analysis of analyses” (Glass, 1976, p. 3). Another definition is the “Integration of the findings of several research studies by means of statistical techniques focusing on the same research question leading to meaningful quantitative data” (Corsini, 2002, p. 588). Results of meta-analyses combine the data from studies that are asking the same research question to produce a result that tells you how strong the impact of the variable of interest is. The result is reported as an effect size. An effect size is a quantitative indicator of the strength of a particular occurrence. For example, a company might be interested in having onsite parking at work and wants to know whether having an onsite parking garage is associated with lower absenteeism than having an offsite parking garage that requires using a shuttle bus to get to the office. If you were to conduct a meta-analysis on this issue, you would use appropriate search terms, in a comprehensive list of databases, to find research where onsite versus offsite parking was examined and one of the outcomes was a measurement of absenteeism. There are specific steps you would then take to combine the results of the studies you found numerically to determine the effect size.
Meta-analysis: Meta-analysis is a “study of studies” that uses a statistical approach to synthesize the findings on a particular topic and to report the impact of a given intervention. That impact is reported as an effect size.
Effect size: Quantitative indication of the strength of a particular occurrence.
One value of a meta-analysis is that it includes a systematic review of the relevant research by the authors. The research studies that were included to calculate the effect size are included in the published meta-analysis, giving you a solid list of references. When you look at a meta-analysis, you get a pretty good idea of the research conducted on this topic. But it is wise to remember another saying sometimes associated with meta-analyses: “garbage in–garbage out,” a phrase that appears to have originated in the computing world (http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gar1.htm). What that phrase means is that the scientific rigor of the studies included in the meta-analysis is important. If the studies are not of high quality, then the outcome of the meta-analysis is questionable.
How Journals Differ: Issues Related to Quality
Journals differ from each other in many ways, from the number of issues they publish each year to their standards of acceptance and their impact factor, which is a number that reflects the average number of times articles from a specific journal have been cited over a particular period of time (e.g., 2 years or 5 years). This impact measure is considered by some to be a proxy for the importance of the journal. You can usually find the impact factor for a given journal on its home page. The Journal Citation Reports (JCR), published by Thomson Reuters, lists journals and their associated impact factor. Access to this report requires a subscription,