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ED 8000 - Foundations of District Leadership

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 educational topics
  • A peer-reviewed journal

Click on the relevant pages on education-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).

How do I know if the Libraries have an article that I need?

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:

Kuhfeld, Soland, J., Tarasawa, B., Johnson, A., Ruzek, E., & Liu, J. (2020). Projecting the Potential Impact of COVID-19 School Closures on Academic Achievement. Educational Researcher, 49(8), 549–565. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X20965918

The most direct way to search is to use the article title - Projecting the Potential Impact of COVID-19 School Closures on Academic Achievement - not the title of the journal (Educational Researcher). When we search Library OneSearch using this title, we can find that the University Libraries have access to this article online!