So, what are peer-reviewed or empirical journals and articles?
In the social sciences and other disciplines, professors and other scholars design and conduct experiments and studies to examine and test various ideas (hypotheses), in this case, about psychology, human behavior and human development.
The scholars write articles detailing their studies, their methodology and their results. These papers (kind of like a long term paper) are reviewed by a group of other scholars in the field (their peers) to assess validity of the writer's study and methodology as well as the appropriate use of statistical analysis performed on the data gathered in the study. Thus, they are called peer-reviewed articles.
Once approved, the study is published in a journal, which is what we will find in our databases.
These studies usually follow the APA format and generally have sections including an Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion.
For a detailed discussion on reading empirical peer-reviewed articles, see this excellent page at Indiana University:
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Examples of a magazine article and a peer-reviewed article (both about psychological stress):
Notice the difference? Helping Children features pictures and newsy content, while A Pilot Study has a longer title, charts and lots of dense text.
TMCC Databases with Psychology Content
The video below explains how to find empirical/peer-reviewed articles in our EBSCO psychology databases: