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. An instructor's request for APA format refers to the writing style in which you will format your paper and citations. (APA is one of many; also including MLA, Chicago, or Turabian paper formats, for example.)

 

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 child abuse and neglect, you can start at the LibGuide for your program at http://libguides.brenau.edu/education

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 your subjects. Click on one to start finding items - for example, try Academic Search 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 child abuse. 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:

 

• child AND abuse - 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.
• child abuse OR child neglect - The OR is another Boolean search term, which tells the database that you will accept articles that discuss EITHER of these terms in it. 
• "child abuse" - The quotation marks tell the database that this is a specific phrase, and it must find articles that keep these two words together.

 

Once you have found an article you would like to use, look for the toolbar on the right side of the page for the Cite button, which will give you a good idea of what the APA citation for this article should look like. However, these computer-generated citations are not perfect! Check your resources to make sure you write your citations and papers in proper APA format, which you'll see in the Citing Sources tab of the Education LibGuide.

 

After you have finished searching in one database, go back the the Articles page on the LibGuide to run the same search in different databases. Each database is a different collection, and the same search can find you different results in each collection. You may also find the databases listed in the Psychology LibGuide handy for these sorts of topics: http://libguides.brenau.edu/psychology

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