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UGS 302: Music and Psychology - Domjan

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Create your Research Strategy

How information is created tells you what role it should play in your information gathering. Think about what kind of information and evidence you need for your research purpose.

  • Newspaper (including online): daily; current events and investigative reporting. Written by journalists and reporters and reviewed by editors.
  • Magazine: monthly or weekly; personal interest stories and interviews; writers often write from a viewpoint shared by subscribers (liberal, conservative, religious, scientific)
  • Academic journals: quarterly; research articles and data from experiments; authors are scholars and researchers at universities or private labs and companies; audience is other researchers in their field

Searching databases is different than searching Google. Distill what you're looking for into a few key terms or phrases,

  1.  

    Key Concepts 

    		 music

    college students

    		 sleep
    Related Terms

     

     

    univeristy students

    undergraduates

     

     

     

     
  2. Combine key terms using AND and OR:​​
    • ​AND narrows your search by looking for articles with all of the words (your two or three key concepts should be connected with AND, because you need all of them represented in useful articles). 
    • OR broadens your search by looking for articles with any of the words (synonyms and related terms should be separated by OR - they get at the same key concepts, so any of them are useful).
  3. Try different combinations of your keywords to get better results as you search.​

Find Articles

  • In the Libraries Search Tool:  Look for the "get pdf or "available online" link. If it says it is only available in print, click Get a Scan to have the article scanned and emailed to you (for free). 
  • In GoogleScholar: Look for the html or pdf link (and you may have to log in with your EID). If you don't see either, look for the View it @ UT link.
  • In Library Databases: Look for the pdf, full text, or hmtl link. If none are available, look for Find it at UT to find it in another database.

 

If none of those work, look up the article title in the Libraries Search tool to see if we have it.

If you can't find it, request it (for free) through Interlibrary Loan and we'll scan and email it to you.

$18m +

The UT Libraries spends over $16 million/year licensing access to scholarly information, including peer-reviewed articles. Although they are behind a paywall, you can access them on and off campus through the library website or this guide with your EID.

What is a peer-reviewed article?

Peer-reviewed articles, sometimes known as scholarly, refereed, research or academic articles, have the following characteristics:

1. Written by researchers/scholars

2. Reviewed by other researchers/scholars - this process is called peer-review

3. Published in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals 

4. Written for an audience of other researchers/scholars

5.  Created to share research with others in the scholarly discipline 

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