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PsycINFO published by the American Psychological Association (APA), provides comprehensive indexing and abstracts of literature on all aspects of psychology, including psychiatry, pharmacology, and applications in nursing, education, management and criminal justice.
# Watch the video to learn more about how to search for journal articles in PsycInfo
This is a definitive source of searchable full-text articles on current issues in psychology.
The world’s most comprehensive database of life sciences and biomedical information covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care.
Psychology Database (ProQuest)
This database provides abstracts and indexing for key Psychology titles, many of which are available in full text. Coverage ranges from behavioural, clinical, cognitive, developmental, experimental, industrial and social psychology, along with personality, psychobiology and psychometrics.
The APA defines an empirical study as a "study based on facts, systematic observation, or experiment, rather than theory or general philosophical principle". Empirical studies articles are published in scholarly/ peer-reviewed journals.
Many databases allow you to limit your search to only empirical studies. In PsycINFO, look for the Methodology search option and use that menu to refine your search by limiting the articles to Empirical Studies only.
Another strategy for finding empirical studies is to add to your keywords some of the following search terms: empirical, research, observation, survey, experiment, findings, "action research", method*, longitudinal study, "participant group" or participants.
The majority of scientific journal articles are written in a standard format. In general, the structure follows: Abstract, Introduction, Methods or Methodology, Results and Analysis, Discussion, and References. Each section of the article serves its unique purpose. By understanding this structure, you will feel more comfortable working with a scientific article.
There are a number of excellent sources that provide a set of guidelines on how to read a research article quickly and efficiently. Here are a few important ones:
Ten simple rules for reading a scientific paper by Art of reading a journal article: Methodically and effectively by # Watch the video on more tips for reading journal articles: How to Read and Comprehend Scientific Journal Articles