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TC 302: Prof. Walker - Mental Health

Find Information to Shape and Support your Recommendations

Scholarly Sources are Good Evidence

Scholarly sources (peer-reviewed journal articles, books, conference proceedings, etc.) serve as good evidence for proposals and arguments in higher education. Use these sources to find analysis and expert information about the mental health of college students, effective approaches to recognizing and intervening in mental health crises, impacts on faculty, staff and peers, and more.

How and Where to Find Scholarly Sources

Library search box - searches across many, but not all, library resources. Great for finding information from a variety of disciplines in one search.

Tips:

  • Use advanced search techniques
  • try different keywords to hone in on your topic.  After you search, you can use the menu on the left side to narrow to peer-reviewed articles, by source type and by year.
  • Try this sample advanced search that uses a variety of keywords.
    • (college students OR undergraduates) AND (mental health OR wellbeing) AND (support models OR warning systems)
    • use AND to require words appear in search results and OR to require one of the words
    • In this example, one of the search terms from each set of parentheses must appear in the search results 

Google Scholar - uses Google to search across scholarly sources. Use it through this guide or the library website in order to be passed through to library subscriptions instead of hitting a paywall.

Where is the article?

If you don’t see a .pdf of the article you want, click Find it at UT to find it in another database or in print in the Libraries.

If it is only in print in the Libraries or we don’t own the article, click Get a Scan to have the article emailed to you.

Library databases (maybe you used Gale or Ebsco databases in hgh school?) let you search for information in a specific discipline. These are useful for diving deeper and doing more precise searching than you can often do in tools that search a broader swath of information.

Useful datatabases for this topic include:

Peer Review in 3 Minutes

From the NCSU Libraries

How can I tell if it's peer-reviewed?

Many library databases will let you limit to scholarly/peer-reviewed articles.  This is a great first step but you still need to check if its peer-reviewed yourself.  Try one of these ways:

1. Google the journal title and read about the journal's process for accepting and publishing work.  It should mention peer review, not just review by an editor.

2. Look up the journal title in a library database called UlrichsWeb.  If it is peer-reviewed (refereed), there will be a little referee shirt there - 

ulrichsweb referee symbol

Find Examples of and Opinions about Mental Health in Higher Ed in New Sources

Mental Health Statistics

Mental health statistics can help you define the scope of the problem as well as learn about the use of different types of interventions. In addition to some larger data sets below, you will also find statistics on organizational web pages and in journal and newspaper articles. Just be sure to evaluate the source for credibility and make sure you know where they are getting their statistics.

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