Databases to Find Empirical Articles
Databases provide access to articles and other information; sometimes the full text is available but sometimes only the abstract and citation information are available (in which case you can request the item through interlibrary loan). Databases can include access to peer-reviewed articles, magazine articles, newspaper articles, etc. Some are specialized by topic, and some are interdisciplinary. Milne Library subscribes to hundreds of databases. Those listed below are a good start for your work in this class:
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Full text for about 8,500 periodicals including over 7,300 peer-reviewed journals across most areas of academic study as well as indexing and abstracts for more than 12,500 magazines and journals. Coverage is from 1887 to the present.
- PubMed This link opens in a new windowPubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
- Gale OneFile: Health & Medicine This link opens in a new window
Find up-to-date information on a range of health care topics. Best for students, researchers, and health care professionals.
- MEDLINE with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Full-text for about 1450 publications. Coverage is from about 1800 to the present, with some full-text from about 1935 to the present.
What are Empirical Articles?
An empirical article is a research article that reports the results of a study that uses quantitative or qualitative data derived from observation or experimentation. Empirical articles are found in peer-reviewed journals. Every empirical articles has several different sections, which typically include Introduction, Literature Review, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, and a substantial list of References. This link will take you to an example of an empirical article.
Empirical articles are always peer-reviewed (also known as scholarly). Peer-review is a process that many scholarly journals undertake to evaluate the quality of the material being submitted. When an article is submitted to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, several impartial reviewers (who are experts in the subject matter) ensure that the article presents properly conducted and original research or writing. They must also assure accuracy and validity.
Though you can usually limit a search in a database to just peer-reviewed articles, it is always best to double-check by using Ulrichsweb, the authoritative source of information on over 300,000 periodicals. Simply type the name of the journal (not the article title) in the search box, find the corresponding journal title, and look for the referee uniform, as in the example below.
