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Human Resource Development

What is an "academic article"?

Students, faculty, and staff who are working on academic research most commonly need to find articles. Often, these articles are called academic, scholarly, or peer-reviewed -- but what do these terms tell us?

  • When something is academic, it's written for an academic audience -- in other words, people who have advanced education (or are engaged in advanced education!) on a topic. Generally, college students, staff, faculty, and other researchers are considered academic audiences.
  • When something is scholarly, it means it's based in someone's research (not that it's related to financial scholarships that students can earn). When it comes to academic resources, scholarly / scholarship and research are used interchangeably -- and these terms both mean that someone is gathering information, analyzing that information in systematic and ethical ways, and drawing conclusions from that information. 
  • When something is peer-reviewed, it's gone through a review process that asks experts in a discipline or field to review research for relevance, connection to the field, ethical behavior in data, how data were analyzed, and whether conclusions drawn make sense. Peer review is focused more on the ideas and connections in an article and not necessarily the spelling / grammatical errors.

It's most effective to look for academic articles through:

  • Library OneSearch, the Libraries' general search tool
  • A database, or collection of resources, that focuses on / has information related to HRD topics
  • A peer-reviewed journal

Click on the relevant pages on HRD-specific databases and journals to find out which tools are most effective for you to use in your own research.

And for more information about how to make sense of the academic articles you find, review the Libraries' Reading Scholarly Articles micro-course, available to the OU community (login required).

Does the library have the article I need?

To locate and retrieve articles or books that are cited in a bibliography or Works Cited page, use Library OneSearch to determine if OU Libraries have access to the item.

Let's say we want to find this article:

Lloyd-Jones, B. (2021). Developing Competencies for Emotional, Instrumental, and Informational Student Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Human Relations/Human Resource Development Approach. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 23(1), 41–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1523422320973287

The most direct way to search is to use the article title - Developing Competencies for Emotional, Instrumental, and Informational Student Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Human Relations/Human Resource Development Approach - not the title of the journal (Advances in Developing Human Resources). When we search Library OneSearch using this title, we can find that the University Library has access to this article online!