Education: Find Articles

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When you search in academic databases including MCC Library OneSearch, keywords give you the best search results. Next time you search, instead of typing in a long phrase such as "all the research that shows evidence to prove there's no life on the moon,"  try keywords.

A better search about lunar life would use keywords and look like this:

"life on the moon" and research

In the peer-review process, in addition to a journal's editorial staff reading a submitted article, a panel of the author's peers who work or do research in the same field also read the article to verify that the work meets the standards of that field. 

To limit your search results to peer reviewed articles, look for a box to check on the results page. It might be in different locations for different databases:

An example in the search results page:           An example on the search box page:       

Sometimes when you look at an article there is an indication of whether the journal is peer reviewed, but sometimes you might have to Google the journal -- you can look for "About" or "Submission Guidelines" on an journal's website to see if they use peer review when accepting articles. If you're still not sure, ask a librarian or your professor. We are glad to help!

You do not have to read every word of a scholarly article--especially at first. Start with the abstract, then scan the introduction. This 5 minute video outlines a strategy for reading scholarly articles.

The databases below are multidisciplinary and include scholarly and popular publications that contain articles on many topics. When you search in these, you are searching in a lot of publications and should be able to find relevant articles.

You can refine your results to certain publication formats.

Multidisciplinary databases such as ProQuest Central and Academic Search Complete will include many articles and reports about education. The databases below are smaller and specialize in education content.

Our eBook collections together number more than 200,000 books.They are scholarly and multidisciplinary, including books on many topics. You can read eBooks online or download them to read offline.

There are also eBooks books in some of our other databases. To search all of MCC Library's eBook collections at the same time, use search MCC eBooks or search using MCC Library OneSearch on our homepage.