Empirical Articles/Studies: How to tell and find quality articles

Step 1:  What's an empirical article?

Learn to recognize an empirical article by watching the video.

Step 2:  Judge for yourself

Open the articles by clicking on the letters.  Decide which ones are empirical and the sort of thing you would want to cite.

Step 3:  Quiz yourself

Check your understanding with this one question quiz.

Watch the video to see how easy it is to find empirical articles using PsycINFO. 

For databases that don't have a way to limit by methodology, some strategies:

1) Look through the results, scan the abstract for clues to recognize it's empirical.

2) Try searching with words that describe types of empirical studies (list not exhaustive):

empirical OR qualitative OR quantitative OR "action research" OR "case study" OR "controlled trial" OR "focus group"

3) Enter other terms you'd expect to see in an abstract.  Some suggestions:

findings OR participant* OR investigat*