Empirical Journal Articles

Empirical journals are also known by the following terms: research, scholarly, professional, peer reviewed/refereed, and scientific.

Empirical journal articles test a hypothesis or opinion about a topic such as “What is the effect of capital punishment on crime?” An empirical article will contain numerous headings including the Hypothesis, Method, Participants, Procedure, and Results, and Conclusions. They also may contain tables and statistics that present the study’s results. Experts write these empirical articles on topics they study based on facts that they discover. Other experts in the field review these articles before they are published (this process is called peer reviewing), which lends credibility to the information contained in the article.

Empirical journal articles for topics can be found using the following “specialized” databases such as Science Direct, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), PsycARTICLES, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) or “interdisciplinary” databases such as Academic Search Premier, Project Muse, ProQuest Research Library, and InfoTrac OneFile.

A journal may also contain non-empirical articles that are essays on a topic that present an expert’s opinion on a topic or review previous literature on a topic but are not tests of a hypothesis. These types of journal articles are called review articles. They do not have the headings mentioned above within the article. These are not appropriate for assignments that require the use of empirical articles.