UPDATE (5/20/26 @ 7:30am AZ time):
The GCU Library's updated version of LopeCat, the library’s online catalog, is live! For more details on what has changed, visit the What's New Guide .
Nursing & Health Sciences: Scholarly & Peer Reviewed Articles
What Can Be a Scholarly Source? What Can Be Peer-Reviewed?
Academic/Scholarly sourcesinclude several different types of sources.
- Peer-Reviewed sourcesare most often journal articles and sometimes books or conference presentations. Many academic journals only publish peer-reviewed articles.
- Empirical sources relate the results of an experiment or study done by the authors. These are most often also peer-reviewed journal articles, but dissertations, theses, conference papers, and technical reports can also be empirical.
- Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methodstudies are all types of empirical research.
What Can Be a Scholarly Source? What Can Be Peer-Reviewed?
- Scholarly Journal Articles can be empirical, peer-reviewed, or both, or neither.
- Academic or Scholarly Books can be empirical, peer-reviewed, or both, or neither. Neither is more common.
- Reference Booksare not empirical, rarely peer-reviewed, but many are scholarly.
- Videosmay be scholarly. For example, the Library subscribes to video collections from the American Psychological Association and academic publisher Sage .
Journal- The title of the publication in which articles are published. Journals cover a specific subject, which can be either broad or narrow in scope. Professional, or trade, publications are a type of journal. For example, PC World.
Volume- Journals are divided into volumes and issues, which describe when articles in a journal were published. Most of the time, the volume number represents all issues of a journal published in a specific year. For example, all articles published in PC World in 2018 are Volume 36.
Issue- The issue number refers to each published installment of the journal. Most journals are published weekly, monthly, or quarterly. For example, if a journal is published monthly, each issue number represents a different month, with January being Issue 1. For PC World in 2018, in Volume 36, there are 12 issues.
Article- Each issue contains several articles. Each article is written by a different person, or group of people, on a specific topic, with its own title. For example, "How to Upgrade your Laptop's RAM" was an article published in PC World, Volume 36, Issue 7, on pages 84-89.
Learn more about identifying, selecting, and evaluating sources on these guides:
Finding Peer-Reviewed Articles
Checking if a Journal is Peer-Reviewed
If you have an article and need to check if the journal is peer-reviewed, you can look it up using the Find Journals by Title feature of our website.
On the Find Journals by Title page, use the search box at the top of the page to type the title of the publication, and search.
If the Library subscribes to the publication, it will show up in the results.
Peer-reviewed journals are marked with an icon and say peer-reviewed. Non-peer reviewed journals do not have the icon or peer-reviewed statement. In the example image below, Advances in Family Practice Nursing is peer-reviewed, while Advances in Nursing & Midwifery is not.
Limiting Databases to Peer-Reviewed Articles
- Most academic library databases, including LopeSearch, have peer-reviewed articles.
- Most databases have a checkbox to limit your search to just peer-reviewed articles.
- The Searching Nursing Databases page has detailed search instructions for each major nursing database.
