LibGuides: Psychology Resource Guide: Find Academic Articles

How to Read a Scholarly Article

What Is Empirical Research?

Using the Advanced Search in JSTOR

Databases with Psychology Journals

Search these databases individually, or all at once with OneSearch (see Find Sources with OneSearch tab). From off campus, you will need to log in for full-text access.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window Includes psychology journals, such as Child Development, Psychological Science, Cognitive Psychology, and Journal of Personality. These collections include magazines and newspapers in addition to academic journals. You can limit your results by source type (to just academic journals), date range, and subject.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window Includes psychology journals, such as The American Journal of Psychology, Journal of Mind and Behavior, Political Psychology, and Social Psychology Quarterly. On the advanced search screen, scroll down page to filter journals searched by subject.
PsycARTICLES This link opens in a new window Includes psychology journals, such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Journal of Applied Psychology. All articles in this collection are from academic journals. You can limit your search results to studies by: age, gender, classification, methodology (e.g., empirical studies), tests & measures, and population. You can also limit results to those with impact statements available.
Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection This link opens in a new window Includes psychology journals, such as Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Analytical Psychology, Journal of Psychology, and Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry. These collections include magazines and newspapers in addition to academic journals. You can limit your results by source type (to just academic journals), date range, and subject.

How to Find Empirical Research Articles

In PsycArticles

Limit Results by Methodology > Empirical Study

Click image to enlarge.

In Other Databases

Go to the Advanced Search
Add to a new search bar the word: empirical
Expand results by adding similar words connected with the OR command: empirical or observational or experimental

Click image to enlarge.

See also the video in the left column on how to identify empirical research.

Open Access Journals

Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) collaborated to identify principles of transparency and best practice for scholarly publications and to clarify that these principles form part of the criteria on which membership applications will be evaluated.

The following journals are members of COPE:

Behavioral Sciences
An international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, behavioral biology and behavioral genetics published monthly online by MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute).
BMC Psychology
An open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers manuscripts on all aspects of psychology, human behavior and the mind, including developmental, clinical, cognitive, experimental, health and social psychology, as well as personality and individual differences.
Collabra: Psychology
The official journal of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. A mission-driven Open Access (OA) journal from the University of California Press that shares not only the research it publishes, but also the value created by the psychology community during the peer-review process.
Frontiers in Psychology
The largest journal in its field, publishing rigorously peer-reviewed research across the psychological sciences, from clinical research to cognitive science, from perception to consciousness, from imaging studies to human factors, and from animal cognition to social psychology.
Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
This open-access journal covers the broad array of content areas within cognitive science, using approaches from cognitive psychology, computer science and mathematical psychology, cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, comparative psychology and behavioral anthropology, decision sciences, and theoretical and experimental linguistics.
SAGE Open
A peer-reviewed, "Gold" open access journal from SAGE that publishes original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. Articles may span the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities.

Fullerton College Library

Psychology Resource Guide: Find Academic Articles