Research Guides: Communication Sciences &amp; Disorders: 2: Find Sources

Find Sources

Find Journal articles report the results of research by experts. Sometimes they're also called "peer-reviewed articles," "scholarly articles," or "academic articles." They are often used in academic research.

You should use journal articles because they:

Contain evidence based on research
Are written by experts
Focus on a narrow topic
Provide detailed information
Are probably more accurate because of the peer-review process
Lend credibility to your paper

Find journal articles in these databases:

PubMed This link opens in a new window PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 21 million citations from biomedical and life science journals.
To determine more easily if UNC has access to the full text of articles, login using the username and password available from the online Username and Passwords list. When first logging into PubMed, choose NCBI account. Then you will be asked to enter the username and password associated with this account. For further assistance, contact Michener Library at (970) 351-2671.
PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
Index of journal and book literature from the American Psychological Association.
Education Source This link opens in a new window
Education Source is designed to meet the needs of education students, professionals and policy makers. The collection provides indexing and abstracts for more than 2,850 academic periodicals and includes full text for more than 1,800 journals, 550 books and monographs, education-related conference papers, citations for over 4 million articles including book reviews and over 100,000 controlled and cross-referenced names of educational tests. Coverage in Education Source spans all levels of education from early childhood to higher education and also includes educational specialties such as multilingual education, health education and testing.

Books on a shelf Some books include research by experts, and you may want to use them in your research project.

You should use books because they:

Give a broad overview of one or more topics
Explain a complex topic (books are easier to understand than journal articles)
Offer in-depth analysis of a topic
Summarize previous research on a topic

Find books in these databases:

UNC Libraries Catalog
Searches books, eBooks, music, videos, and other items at the Michener and Skinner Libraries.
Prospector
Searches books at other libraries in Colorado and Wyoming. Request books from these libraries and have them delivered to the Michener or Skinner Libraries.

Researcher collects data Tests and measures are often used in research to collect information about people. There are different types of tests and measures, including:

Assessments
Scales
Questionnaires
Surveys
Inventories

If you are conducting an experiment or observation, you may be able to use or adapt an existing test or measure for your own data collection. While some tests and measures are commercial and proprietary (cost money), others are available for free to researchers.

Find tests and measures in these databases:

Health and Psychosocial Instruments This link opens in a new window
Health & Psychosocial Instruments (HaPI), produced by Behavioral Measurement Database Services, is a comprehensive bibliographic database providing information about behavioral measurement instruments. Information in the database is abstracted from hundreds of leading journals covering health sciences and psychosocial sciences.
PsycTESTS This link opens in a new window
PsycTESTS, produced by the American Psychological Association (APA), serves as a repository for a growing selection of psychological tests and measures, including thousands of actual test instruments and test items that are available for immediate download and use in research and teaching.
Mental Measurements Yearbook with Tests in Print This link opens in a new window
Mental Measurements Yearbook contains descriptive information and reviews of commercially available standardized educational, personality, aptitude, neuropsychological, achievement, and intelligence tests. Tests in Print (TIP) serves as a comprehensive bibliography to commercially available tests that are currently in print in the English language. TIP provides information including test purpose, test publisher, in-print status, print, test acronym, intended test population, administration times, publication date(s), and test author(s).

Search Effectively

Yellow, blue, and purple keys Unlike Google, library databases can't understand complete sentences. You'll need to break your topic down into the most important concepts, also called keywords, and use those keywords to search library databases.

Example topic: How does social media impact happiness among teenagers?

Keywords: social media, happiness, teenagers

Brainstorm synonyms:

Sometimes experts use different terms than we use in everyday conversation. It's important to think of synonyms and related terms for your keywords so that you can use different combinations of words to get the best results when searching.

Keyword: teenagers

Synonyms: adolescents, youth

Library databases often have built-in search tools. Try them out!

Peer-Reviewed: Limit your search to journal articles.
Discipline: Limit your search to a particular discipline (such as psychology or education).
Publication Date: Limit your search to sources published during certain years.
Subject Terms: These are like library hashtags. Limit your search to sources about that subject.

Quotation marks Experts often cite each other's work, and that can help you find more sources on your topic!

To find older relevant sources:

Find the list of sources at the end of a relevant source you've found. This may be called "bibliography," "works cited," or "references."
Look for titles in the list that relate to your topic.
Copy and paste relevant titles into a library database.

To find newer relevant sources:

When you find a relevant source in a database, look for a link called "Cited by."
Click this link to see more recent sources that may be related to your topic.

Create Your PubMed Account

PubMed is a free database that gives you access to articles from biomedical and life science journals. This video shows how to create a PubMed account so that you can easily check if UNC has access to the full text of articles you find.