CNS 8999 - Dissertation Research

Students, faculty, and staff who are working on academic research most commonly need to find academic, scholarly, or peer-reviewed articles. These terms are used interchangeably but mean different things.

• 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. 
• When something is scholarly, it means it's based in someone's research, which involves 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. 

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 counseling topics
• A peer-reviewed journal

You can also use cited reference searching and alerts to easily find connected / related resources to your most important articles / research resources.

Click on the relevant sub-pages to find out more information about these topics.

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:

Litam, S. D. A., & Hipolito‐Delgado, C. P. (2021). When Being “Essential” Illuminates Disparities: Counseling Clients Affected by COVID‐19. Journal of Counseling and Development, 99(1), 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcad.12349

The most direct way to search is to use the article title - When Being “Essential” Illuminates Disparities: Counseling Clients Affected by COVID‐19 - not the title of the journal (Journal of Counseling and Development). When we search Library OneSearch using this title, we can find that the University Library has access to this article online!

If you're trying to make sense of the academic articles you've found, you can review the Libraries' micro-course on Reading Scholarly Articles. 

Once you’ve worked through this micro-course, you will be able to:

• Describe the kinds of information you’ll find in scholarly and popular articles, and identify the differences between these kinds of resources.
• Identify the sections of a scholarly article as well as the kinds of information you can expect to find in each section
• Explain strategies to read scholarly articles meaningfully and intentionally, and pick out the strategies that will be most useful as you read scholarly articles in your discipline.

This three-lesson micro-course takes about 20 minutes to complete, and you can earn a credential (digital badge) upon successfully completing the course with a score of at least 80%.