KH4350: Professional Development(Summer 2025)

Tips for your Assignment:

• No articles older than 2014
• No review articles at all.
  • If you see the word "review" in the title or abstract, choose a different article.
• You need at least 8 peer reviewed, empirical articles.
  • Frequently, the word "study" will appear in the title or abstract to let you know that the article is empirical. You may also see "original research". Oftentimes, the article does not use that wording, but the methods section will let you know that the article is empirical. Also, be sure you are choosing human subject research. So, the article will give a lot of details about the participants.

For help searching for articles, feel free to email Denise George below with the email button or at denisegeorge@gsu.edu. She can email back and forth with you, or meet online or in person.

What is peer-reviewed?

• For academic journals, peer review means that it was written and reviewed by experts before being published. This helps ensure the quality of the article.

What is an empirical article?

• This means that the authors of the article are the ones who conducted the study, and they are reporting on the study that they conducted.
• You will always see a methodology section which is usually but not always labeled as such. The methodology section will detail how the study was done. A good empirical article will give you enough detail that you could do the same study in the same way if you wanted to replicate it.

A literature review is not empirical-Also, don't use systematic reviews

• You've probably done a book review at some point in your life. A literature review is also a review, but instead of reviewing one book, a literature review summarizes, compares, and/or synthesizes a lot of different articles in one paper.  In many disciplines the articles being reviewed are empirical. So, even though the literature review is not empirical, it can sometimes help you find empirical articles. Don't forget to look over the reference list at the end to get a sense of this.
• A systematic review is an exception. A systematic review is not human subject research, but it is research about studies in the field and is considered empirical if it includes a meta-analysis or meta-syntheses. So, you will often see this type of article appear even when trying to narrow to studies. If the review is systematic, it will say so, and it will have a methodology section. Since a systematic review is so different from other types of empirical research, we will not be using them in this assignment.

Use a library database with a filter/checkbox for peer reviewed/scholarly.

OR

Check the journal's website. You'll sometimes see it under About or under Author Guidelines.