For the Statistics 1 course (MAT 2215) you may be asked to find journal articles that use statistical methods you are learning about, such as regression analysis, confidence intervals, linear regression, best-fit, correlation, or scatter plots. These will not be about statistics, but articles about an investigation or research study where they used statistics to show the result.
Here are some suggestions for the best databases to search, search terms to use, and tips on how to find appropriate articles. The first two are general and were suggested by one of the Statistics instructors, but you can use the others, especially if you need to find studies related to your major, and you are not finding them in Academic Search Premier or ERIC.
Databases:
- Academic Search Premier
- ERIC
- Criminal Justice Database (for Criminal Justice students)
- Healthcare Administration Database (for Health Service Management students)
- ABI/Inform (for Business, Management, Marketing or Fashion majors)
The type of articles that will have statistical methods or charts included will be ones describing academic research, medical studies or experiments which generate data. The way to search for those in one of the databases is to look for a check box to limit your results to peer-reviewed or scholarly journal articles. Or once you get a list of results, you can also look on the left and check off Scholarly Journals or Peer reviewed and Full-text. That's also where you can restrict the results to more recent articles. Here are examples from 2 different types of databases:
CRIMINAL JUSTICE DATABASE (from ProQuest; also works for Healthcare Administration & ABI/Inform):
Or when you have a results list from your search, look on the left to restrict it to Peer-reviewed:
ACADEMIC SEARCH PREMIER (from EBSCOhost; also works for ERIC, LibSearch & CINAHL):
Or when you have a results list from your search, look on the left to restrict it to Scholarly (Peer-reviewed) Journals:
Search Terms:
We suggest not using too many statistical terms at once. You might use a major statistical model, such as "regression analysis" or "confidence interval" and a word from your major, such as crime, or healthcare or management, like this: "regression analysis" AND crime (putting phrases in quotes will keep the words together).
Once you do a search in one of our Berkeley databases, scroll through your results, looking at the titles and previews to see if they seem to discuss any of your subtopics. If the article has to have a certain type of statistical display, you can search for that: (scatterplot or "scatter plot") AND "hospital costs". Most scholarly articles about research will have a Methods or Statistical Methods section saying how they analyzed their data, and a Results section with data, CI's, tables, graphs, scatter plots, etc. displaying their data trends.
Note: Some images will only display in the PDF version of the article, so click on that if you do not see the graphs and tables.
For information on finding statistics themselves (the data on crime rates, incidence of a disease, financial ratios) rather than looking for the statistical methods or tools, check out this Finding Statistics Library Research Guide.