Education (Research Resources): Finding Empirical Research

• Empirical studies are those based on actual and objective observation or experimentation.
• Articles that describe empirical research studies are published in scholarly or academic journals.
• Many scholarly or academic journals are peer-reviewed or refereed, meaning that a panel of experts in the field selects and reviews the articles published in the journal. These articles are often, but not always, empirical studies.
• Empirical studies articles comprise the following parts (wording may vary):
• abstract
• introduction (and review of the literature)
  
• method
• results
• discussion (and/or Conclusion)
  
• references

(Thanks to the  McIntyre Library Staff at University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire- created by: Jill Markgraf)

This is just a sampling of the many databases containing empirical studies.

Most databases will let you limit your search to articles that are:

• scholarly
• academic
• peer-reviewed
• refereed

Many, but not all, of these will be empirical studies.

To further focus your search, try adding one of the following terms to your search (try different combinations):

• study
• methodology (or method)
• empirical
• research
• findings
• results
• participants
• qualitative or quantitative

In addition, in the database ERIC you can limit "publication type" to Reports - Research to retrieve empirical studies.

(Thanks to the  McIntyre Library Staff at University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire- created by: Jill Markgraf)