As provided by your professor, this is a blog by Jennifer Raff. It is estimated to be a 7 minute read to help you understand how to read a scientific paper.
Put it all together:
Here are database-friendly searches, with unnecessary words removed:
Instead of: "What are the causes of test anxiety?"
Use: "test anxiety" AND cause*
Instead of: "What's the effect of the pandemic on mental health of college students?"
Use: COVID-19 AND "mental health" AND "college students"
Instead of: "Does using social media increase anxiety among teenagers?"
Use: "social media" AND anxiety AND teen*
Database searching summary:
This 3-minute video was created by Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
How do you know a "Scholarly Article" (also referred to as academic articles or peer-reviewed articles) when you come across one?
Articles in different fields may differ slightly. A scholarly article comparing two works of literature will lack data, graphs, and discussions of methodology. A scientific paper about a new medication SHOULD have all of these things:
These reference databases offer overviews of your issue, and offers ideas to narrow your topic.
The ProQuest Central database searches millions of articles from newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals. Use it to fill in gaps in your research.
Open access journals are meant to freely share high-quality, credible academic research on the web. They are usually run by universities. The DOAJ "is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals," according to their website.
Save time by looking up the citations that scholarly sources provide!
This video explains how to read a citation to see if it is a book or an article. It was produced by librarians at Cornell University.