CSD 345 Professional Writing: Types of Scholarly Research

You are being asked to locate and use articles that are "empirical research". Empirical research uses data derived from actual observation or experimentation.

To determine if an article is an empirical research article, use these guidelines (from USF's guide listed below):

• What is the name of the journal? Popular magazines like Newsweek or Time don’t publish empirical research articles; publications like the Journal of Educational Research or the Journal of Educational Psychology do.
• How long is the article? An empirical research article is usually substantial, not 1 or 2 pages.
• Does the article contain references to other works? Serious researchers always cite their sources.
• Does the abstract of the article contain variations of the words study, measure, subjects, data, survey, or statistical to describe the empirical research?

Here are some resources that explain what empirical research is.  

• Research Methods: Understanding: Empirical Research This is a tutorial aimed at linguistics majors, but has some useful information on the process of empirical research.
• Strategies for finding empirical studies and research articles This site gives some suggestions on terms to use when searching library databases for empirical articles.
• What are empirical research articles? - a brief guide from Cal Poly Pomona with examples using EBSCO databases
• Finding Empirical Research for Psychology - from University of San Francisco (USF)

Empirical Article: Research articles describe and document research conducted by the author(s). Empirical studies are based on data derived from observation or experimentation. Research articles usually comprise an abstract, introduction, methodology, results, discussion, list of references and appendices.

Literature Review: An article in which the authors present the findings of other scholars studies. A literature review identifies major scholars and studies in a particular research area, summarizes current findings and provides a robust bibliography.