LibGuides: How to Use EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate: Peer Reviewed Articles & Empirical Studies

How to Analyze a Peer Reviewed Article

Click on the image below to learn more about how to analyze a scholarly article.

"Anatomy of a Scholarly Article" by NCSU Libraries is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US)

Structure of a Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Article

What is IMRaD?

IMRaD is an acronym for Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. It describes the format for the sections of a research report. Please see below for the breakdown of each section:

Introduction	Literature Review consisting of previous studies Presents the gap/problem and calls for new research Solution to bridge the gap/problem (i.e. generates a hypothesis for the study)
Method	How and where the research was conducted (survey, interviews, etc.) Information about participants
Results	Presents data/findings of the study
Discussion	Interpretation of the data and results Implications or limitations to the study or field

Empirical Research Studies

An empirical study is research that has been derived from actual, original, observed experiences with data collection, then published in scholarly peer-reviewed journals.

If you are a student researching for a psychology course, PsychArticles—part of the EBSCOhost database collection— has a filter that allows you to quickly limit to empirical studies within that specific database.

Choose the "Advanced Search" at the right of the main search box.
Scroll down the Advanced Search page to the "Methodology" drop down menu.
Select "Empirical Study" to narrow down to just these types of sources.