Q. How do I find an empirical research article?

• What is an empirical article?
• Characteristics of an empirical article
• How do I find empirical articles?
• Further details

What is an empirical article?

Empirical research articles are also known as experimental or primary research articles.

Empirical articles are written by scientists reporting on an experiment or similar research that they conducted.

You'll find empirical articles in scholarly journals (also known as academic or peer-reviewed journals) within the library databases.

Characteristics of an empirical article

An empirical article will almost always be written in technical, specialized language, intended for an audience of experts rather than the general public (the writing will "sound" scientific). Often, you'll see quantitative (numerical) data arranged in tables or charts. And an empirical article will almost always have a specific structure following (more or less) these headings within the article:

• Abstract
  • The author summarizes her article
• Introduction
  • The author discusses the general background of her research topic; often, she will present a literature review, that is, summarize what other experts have written on this particular research topic
• Methods
  • The author describes the study she designed and conducted
• Results
  • The author presents the data she gathered during her experiment
• Discussion
  • The author offers ideas about the importance and implications of her research findings, and speculates on future directions that similar research might take
• Literature Cited
  • The author gives a References list of sources she used in her paper

How do I find empirical articles?

A reasonable keyword search on almost any scientific, medical, or technical topic, for example:

• trauma AND "therapy animals"
• "climate change" AND "polar ice"

will bring up many empirical articles in the following databases, which, being science-oriented, contain almost exclusively empirical articles. So just review the characteristics of an empirical article above, and you should be able to find them in library databases such as:

• Academic Search Ultimate
• Science Direct
• Medline
• APA PsycArticles
• APA PsycInfo

In other databases, such Business Source Ultimate or Environment Complete, if you limit your search to "scholarly" only (sometimes labeled "academic" or "peer-reviewed" only), then many of your results will probably be empirical articles. Again, review an article to see if it matches the characteristics outlined above.

Further details

• Finding Experimental (Empirical) Research Articles (psychology)
• Primary Research Articles (general science)