Answered Questions

A "peer reviewed article" refers to an article that is written by a scholar and has undergone rigorous review by other scholars in the field prior to publication, which ensures that the scholar's methods are sound and conclusion is credible. This is different from a review, which is simply a published opinion of a work. (For example, you could locate a review of a movie by Roger Ebert, but it is a statement of his opinion and not a peer-reviewed study that cinema scholars would necessarily agree with.)

 

Many databases make finding a peer reviewed article easy by including a handy checkbox option in your results to see only peer reviewed items! Here's more detailed information on how to locate what you are looking for:

 

For general articles about work morale, the best place to start is the Business LibGuide! http://libguides.brenau.edu/business

Click on the yellow Articles tab at the top.

In the middle of the page, you'll see a list of the best databases for finding articles about business topics. Click on one to start finding items - for example, try ABI/INFORM Complete.

Log in with your Brenau username and password.

In the search box at the top, type your search terms: start with something simple like workplace AND morale. The AND is a Boolean search term, which tells the database that you want to find only articles that include BOTH of these words in it. When you have entered your search terms, click the Search button.

You may see an overwhelming number of results when you start, but you can narrow them down using the options on the side of the results page. Here's some of the best options you might click to refine your search results:

• Full Text - This gives you only articles that you may read immediately, usually a PDF or webpage.
• Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals - This gives you only articles from academic journals that have undergone rigorous scholarly review before publication. No newspapers or People Magazine here!
• Publication Date - This is how you can choose the date range for articles in the results.
• Geography - This lets you specify a location, like the United States, for your case studies.
• Subject: Thesaurus Term - This option gives you a list of the most-used terms in the wide range of results you've found. You can check the terms that most closely apply to what you are looking for to narrow down your subtopics.

As you tweak your search, also consider trying out different terms for your topic:

 

• workplace AND motivation
• employee AND morale
• "work environment" AND motivation (the quotation marks tell the database that this is a specific phrase)

 

After you have finished searching in one database, try to run the same search in different databases (perhaps Business Source Complete or Academic Search Complete). Each database is a different collection, and the same search can find you different results in each collection.

Please let us know if we can be of any further help!