RDG 7720 - Qualitative Research Design and Methods

Academic Articles

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. 

Professional Articles

In practical fields -- like reading and language arts -- we may also encounter professional articles. These resources are often written by professionals in the field, for other professionals who are doing the same kind of work. Such articles can be really useful for your coursework and your own practices as an educator!

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

• Library OneSearch, the Libraries' general search tool
• A database, or collection of resources, that focuses on / has information related to reading, literacy, and other connected topics
• A specific journal or publication

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

In academic articles, the authors cite their sources in the text and at the end of their work (in a References or Works Cited page). If you find an article that is useful or interesting, use its citations to identify additional related or relevant resources on your topic!  

The easiest way to locate and retrieve articles or books that are cited in a References or Works Cited list is to use Library OneSearch to determine if OU Libraries have access to the item.

Let's say we want to find this article:

Bennett, S. V., Gunn, A. A., & Peterson, B. J. (2021). Access to Multicultural Children’s Literature During COVID‐19. The Reading Teacher, 74(6), 785–796. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2003

The most direct way to search is to use the article title - Access to Multicultural Children’s Literature During COVID‐19 - not the title of the journal (The Reading Teacher). When we search Library OneSearch using this title, we can find that the University Libraries have access to this article online!