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HY 429 Studies in Latin American History: Latin American Revolutions: Articles

This guide was created to support Dr. Urban's HY 429 course in Fall 2024.

What are Scholarly Articles and Where do I Find Them?

Scholarly articles are papers written by (usually multiple) experts in a subject and published in academic journals. The experts submit the papers they have written to be published in academic journals. Most academic journals use a peer-review process to review articles for quality before publication.

A database is a collection of many different academic journals that can all be searched at once. 

You search a database by creating a search query. Search queries use search terms and can have Boolean Operators and punctuation. Based off your search query, you will get a list of articles (and other resources) as results.

Why Care About Peer-review?

Peer-reviewed articles (also known as "refereed articles") have gone through the peer review process prior to publication.

The author's expert peers evaluate the quality of the article and the article's research. The publisher publishes the article only after the article has been approved by the expert reviewers.

If an article is peer-reviewed, you can be more confident in the article's quality.

How Can I Tell if an Article is Peer-Reviewed?

There are a few different ways to check if an article is peer-reviewed. Each journal may represent the peer-review process differently.

If you search for articles in a database like Academic Search Complete, you might have the option to filter to show only peer-reviewed articles. In Academic Search Complete, this option is in the Advanced Search screen. There is a checkbox to filter to show only peer-reviewed items.

If you use a different database, or no database at all, to find articles, you will have to do the investigating yourself.

Some publisher website layouts will have peer-review process timestamps like this:

Screenshot of a Publication History timeline with dates for the peer-review process.

Sometimes, only the article's PDF will have these timestamps.

What Kind of Article did I Find?

The same journal can publish different types of articles. These article types might not all go through peer review (be refereed).

Not all publishers label their article types! Be on the lookout to check what type of article you have accessed!

Look at different article types with me in this Article Types Video.

Book Review

Book Review Example.

  • Book reviews often start with a citation of the book being reviewed. This might include a price.
  • Book reviews do not include original research.

Editorial

Editorial Example.

  • Editorials focus on the journal, journal issue, or another article published in the journal.
  • Editorials are written by editors.
  • Editorials do not include original research.

Opinion

Opinion Example.

  • Opinion pieces focus on a topic adjacent to actual research. They might discuss another published article, a community's attitude towards a research topic, or questions about a discipline practice.
  • Opinion pieces should not include original research.

 

How to Create a Search Query

Databases do not understand questions like Google can.

Databases talk through search queries. 

Search queries are combinations of search terms, Boolean Operators, and punctuation.

  • Search terms
    • Break your research question down into individual words or small phrases.
  • Boolean Operators
    • Follow the Boolean Operators page.
  • Punctuation Marks
    • " " - Quotation marks means you want that exact phrase to be searched. Not all databases follow this.
      • "Carnegie Library" - you only get resources that have "Carnegie Library" exactly.
    • ? - Truncation/Wildcard symbol. Tells the database to substitute any letter there.
      • bibliograph? = bibliography, bibliographies, bibliographic...
      • read? = read, reading, reader, readmit, readdress...