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SW 200/SW 201: Introduction to Social Work and Social Welfare: Articles

This guide was created to support Dr. Kelley's SW 201 class 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. These papers focus on specific topics and may be written about new research studies, case studies, reviews of previous research, or other research-related topics.

Academic journals are run by editors and published by publishing companies, universities, or professional associations. Most academic journals use a peer-review process to review articles for quality. Most academic journals have scopes, and they only publish articles that fit within the journal's scope. An academic journal that doesn't have a peer-review review process or has a very broad scope has warning signs of being low-quality. 

A database is a collection of many different academic journals that can all be searched at once. Databases allow you to limit your search by certain filters, usually including by peer-review status. This is a way to feel more secure that you are being shown quality articles published in quality journals.

You can search a database by creating and submitting a search query. 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.

In the peer review process, the author's expert peers evaluate the quality of the article and the article's research. Very often, the author(s) will have to revise their articles and make changes before resubmitting. 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.

How to Create a Search Query

A database is searched by creating a search query. A search query is the combination of search terms, filters, and code that you type or select before clicking the search button.

  • Search terms are the words or phrases you want the search feature to look for.
    • Different databases search different parts of the text. Some databases, like JSTOR or newspaper collections, only do a full-text search. Their search features will only pull items that have those phrases in the actual text.
    • Other databases, like Academic Search complete, will search the actual text and the description of the text.
    • Many databases have multiple textboxes where you can enter multiple search terms at once. You do not need to put a term in every textbox.
    • Put phrases in "quotation marks" to search the entire phrase as one chunk.
      • deep ecology without quotation marks may result in a list of articles that use just the word "ecology"
      • "deep ecology" with quotation marks will only result in a list of articles that use that exact phrase
  • Filters are selections built into the search feature. You can choose different filters to narrow down your results. Common filters are by publication date or by language.
  • Code includes any special terms or punctuation to add to your search. Some search features might not understand every code.
    • ? or * are commonly use to truncate your searches. This means that a search for: read* will really search for any word that starts with read. The articles you get shown might contain the words "read," "readers," or "readmit".

This is an example of a search in Academic Search Complete:

Screenshot of Academic Search Complete search function. Two terms are entered, "cooking shows" and "health behavior."