Off The Shelf

One of the most annoying parts of research is finding a reference to a great article, and then not having instant access online. Whether you’re a procrastinator waiting until the day before your paper is due, or just an impatient researcher who wants to read everything right away, no one likes to discover that what they want won’t be available right now.

Like many learners, I didn’t like to wait for interlibrary loan either. My solution while working on my degree was to spend a Saturday morning driving to various university libraries with a notepad, pen, and a sack of quarters for the copier.

Not everyone is willing to take my decidedly old-fashioned approach to bypassing interlibrary loan. These days there are some web-based alternatives forming.

DeepDyve is a scholarly article rental service. For 99 cents you can read an article online for 24 hours. No printing. No saving. Their collection is heavily weighted toward scientific journals, which can be extremely expensive. New car expensive, not just used car expensive.

Of course, many journal publishers are happy to sell you an article permanently. But at $25 each, that can be a very expensive way to do research. For the focused researcher, a rental for a day may be just what’s needed.

Some researchers aren’t content to pay any money for scholarly articles, and instead have resorted to the same type of file sharing that music lovers have used. Just as sharing music with strangers has run afoul of copyright law, swapping journal articles runs the same risks. A research article in the Internet Journal of Medical Informatics investigated the breadth of file sharing on one internet site. They estimated $700,000 worth of losses to journal publishers in the 6 month period of their study.

We’re still in the early days of scholarly information online. There are plenty of business models (legal and not) waiting to be tried. Who knows what the landscape will look like in another 10 years. Perhaps the journal subscription will disappear. Or perhaps libraries will simply be portals for content, rather the warehouses of information. In any case, the options for accessing scholarly articles are increasing. Just try to keep your discussion post from turning into a court case!

- Erin

Try Proquest Education Journals. There is some overlap  between journals in  ERIC  (Education Resources Information Center) and Proquest Education Journals, but for the most part the journals in this database are unique. That means you may find other articles on your topic.

If you are doing a comprehensive literature review on a topic in either K-12 or Higher Education it is essential you search both ERIC and Proquest Education Journals. Having trouble finding peer-reviewed journal articles on your topic? Don’t struggle - use the resources that are included in your tuition payment - Ask-a-Librarian!  

Robin

If you have a specific title in mind, you can always check Journal and Book Locator and search for that title.  But did you know that you can also run a search to find all the journals in the library that have certain keywords in their titles?  For instance, if you want to see if we have journals about sports psychology, you can run the following search:

Journal and Book Locator search

(sport* will search for any word that starts with the word sport: sport, sports, sporting, etc.)

 You will get the following four results.  Note that two of them are not located in databases that you can find on the Articles, Books and More page:

Journal and Book Locator Results

This brings me to another method you can use to find articles from our stand alone journals:  Search databases with the Full Text box unchecked.  Most databases actually index more journals than they include full text.  By searching with the full text feature off, you will get additional results.  In fact, if you’re a doctoral learner working on your dissertation, we recommend that you always search the databases with the full text limiter turned off to make sure that you are conducting a thorough search of the literature.

When you run a search without limiting to full text, you will then naturally get some results that will not have a full text link.  Instead, some of the results will say Check Article Linker or Linked Full Text (Ebsco databases) or Link to full text (ProQuest).  Simply click on the link to see if the article is available in either another database or from one of our stand alone journals.

To continue with our sports psychology theme, you would pick an appropriate database for your topic, in this case PsycINFO, and then run a search such as the one below, making sure to uncheck the full text limiter:

PsyINFO database search

Now, even though PsycINFO doesn’t include the full text for the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, we can pull up results for it (and other stand alone journals) because PsycINFO does index it.  Simply click on the link to get to the full text:

PsycINFO search results

As always, if you have questions about article searching, Ask a Librarian! 

 -Kim 

While we all know to read critically any information we locate on the free world wide web, sometime there’s a tendency to forget to read critically when it comes to published magazines and journals. Especially when it comes to Peer Reviewed journals, as they are referred to as the Gold Standard of Academic Publishing.

But as shown in this humorous account from professor Dr. Rick Trebino about attempting to publish in one of those journals, there clearly is room for bias and missing opposing voices. Dr. Trebino attempted to publish a comment to a scientific study published in the “most prestigious journal” of his field that he found to have drawn conclusions on badly calculated data. When he attempts to publish a comment pointing out that the study is wrong and how, a very long and ridiculous process ensued.

The reason this sadly funny situation is important is because it points out that bias does exist and some voices are not heard in scholarly publishing, and mistakes do happen and make their way through peer review onto the printed page. Always reading critically looking at the conclusions the researchers have drawn, the research methodology they used and how well they executed it, the data collected, and other aspects of scholarly papers is a good practice. The fact that the paper Dr. Trebino discredited was published in the first place shows that even when a study is reviewed by 3 scholarly reviewers, mistakes do make their way to publication only to be refuted later.

-Sommer

As you may already know, scholarly articles are typically found in peer reviewed journals. That means only those articles that gain approval from the reviewers are actually published. That leaves a lot of rejected articles.

So what happens to them?

Some are reworked and resubmitted elsewhere, and others just disappear. But so many articles are rejected at least once that a group of graduate students in mathematics have created their own open-access journal: Rejecta Mathematica. This journal only publishes articles that have been rejected by other journals. You can see the journal’s website and inaugural publication here.

This brings up some interesting questions about scholarly literature, which can affect your dissertation literature review and your own chances of being published:

• How much research is lost because there isn’t a journal on the topic? (Many articles are rejected because they don’t match the usual content of a journal.)
• If you are using articles from the 2nd tier of journals in your field, are you filling your literature review with rejects? And is that a problem?
• Are authors aiming too high? Are we missing out on great research that just can’t fit in the top journal or two?

What do you think?

- Erin

Scholarly, peer reviewed, juried, refereed..… When referring to a professional journal or article, all these terms mean the same thing – the article content has been rigorously  reviewed and evaluated by a committee of subject experts and given the seal of approval for academic publishing. 

Now let’s imagine if we take that peer review process and put it to work in an elementary school.  The Onion (a weekly satirical newspaper publishing fake news for our entertainment) did just that. 

Please do enjoy The Onion’s article on the unforgiving fifth-grade peer review process.

Fifth-grade peer review

On a more educational note – if you would like to learn more about the REAL peer review process and how to find peer-reviewed journals and articles, check out the following Capella Library tutorial and accompanying PDF to learn what peer-reviewed journals are, how to find them in a library database, and where to look and find a journal’s peer-reviewed status.

What are Peer-reviewed Articles & How do I Find Them? (Flash with audio)
What are Peer-reviewed Articles & How do I Find Them? (PDF)

- Jennie

As a learner, your main concern is often simply “is this peer reviewed or not.”  But there’s a lot more to it than that.

Despite being considered the “gold standard” of academic publishing, peer review is a complicated, sometimes messy, process that comes with its own sets of frustrations and drawbacks.  Getting scholars all on the same page can be a bit like, well, herding cats.

For the basics on peer review, see our guide: What are Peer-reviewed Articles & How do I Find Them? (Flash with audio) (PDF).

For a deeper understanding of what peer review can mean within a discipline, you can start with this short interview with researcher Michele Lamont from the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Although she doesn’t speak to the specific programs we have at Capella, you can gain some understanding about how the nature of the discipline can affect the peer-review process.  When peer review is supposed to identify what is good scholarship, the definition of “good” becomes very important.  Do you know what “good” looks like in your field?  Do you agree with the definition used in your discipline?

- Erin

When looking exclusively for peer-reviewed journal articles, most people let the databases do the heavy lifting. In most of the library’s databases you can check a little box, and you’ll only get back the scholarly material you want, right?

Not quite. Peer review is an editorial decision at the journal, which means that all FULL ARTICLES are subjected to the peer-review process.

But not everything in a journal is a scholarly article.

Most journals include other content, such as letters to the editor, book reviews, summaries of recent conferences, etc. These items are NOT peer reviewed.

Even if you know you’re looking at items from a peer-reviewed journal, it’s a good idea to evaluate them according to the same scholarly article criteria you’d use if you didn’t know the journal’s editorial policies. Peer-reviewed articles will match most of the following:

• Always includes references
• Uses jargon of the discipline
• Reports on a research study with methodology and data analysis
• Gives authors’ titles and affiliation
• Long, descriptive title
• More than 5 pages long

For more information, see our guide What are Peer-reviewed Articles and How do I find Them?

- Erin

When many people think of research, they automatically think of books.  They’re big, packed with information, and fill library shelves.  But as you work on your degree at Capella, you may find yourself using very few of them.

This isn’t just because it’s hard for your Capella librarians to get ebooks to sit upright on a shelf. 

As you progress to higher degrees, books will be less likely to meet your research needs.  In fact, by the time you’re working on a doctoral degree, you may be using scholarly journal articles almost exclusively.  

This is because scholarly journals:

• are published faster than most books.
• often contain peer-reviewed articles.
• provide literature reviews in the field.
• cover single, specific research studies.

Books are still a great resource for research, but they do have their place.  Once you have developed a real understanding of your field, you may no longer need the general summaries that books often provide.

For more information about different sources, please see our guides:

Sources: What can you use for your research?
Evaluating Sources in Business and Technology
What are Peer-Reviewed Articles and How Can I Find Them (Flash, with Audio)

- Erin
 

The higher you go with your education, the more likely it is that you’ll be using primary resources for your research. By the time you are working on a dissertation, you may be using primary resources exclusively. Primary sounds important, but what does it really mean?

Primary resources come up a lot in some fields, especially history. And in a field like history, identifying a primary resource is pretty easy. It’s an item (document, image, etc.) that is from the place and period you are researching. Old diaries, photographs, and newspaper stories are common examples.

In other fields, primary resources are more difficult to identify. In fields that are driven by experimental and survey research, primary resources are the data and reports produced from that original (primary) research.

Think of it in terms of layers of interpretation. A researcher creates a research study and then writes up the results for a journal article. They are the first people to touch that specific research study – they have created a primary resource.

Later, someone else reads the study and talks about it in a book chapter. They are one step away from the original research, so they are creating a secondary resource.

You can even have a third layer (tertiary resources), where someone has summarized all the secondary research. These are typically textbooks or encyclopedias.

Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Every primary research article contains a literature review. That literature review is a mini-secondary resource that goes along with the primary research of the rest of the article. The researcher has to summarize what’s already gone on in the field in order to properly position her own research. When using a research article for a paper that requires primary resources, pay attention to what part of the article you are referencing. The quote you are using may actually be secondary resource material.

So, when you are considering a resource for your paper, think about how far removed it is from the original research event. Just as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is a primary resource about World War II, so is Stanley Milgram’s research article Behavioral Study of Obedience about people willing to give intense electric shocks to strangers based on an authority figure’s instructions.

Note: Primary resources are not the same as seminal articles. Seminal has to do with the importance of the research to the development of the field. Primary resources can be seminal, but they can also be totally without influence.

- Erin