TIP: If you have difficulty finding an article on your disability category, try searching for a specific disability within that category. For example, if your category is orthopedic impairments, you could try searching for cerebral palsy or spina bifida.
Important: the library has access to both of these databases through a platform called EBSCOHost. This means that the search and results pages will look very, very similar. You can tell what database you're searching by looking above the search boxes.
Toward the top of your search results screen, you'll see the most commonly used filters.
Click Peer Reviewed (labeled #1 in the screenshot below) to narrow your results to peer-reviewed, scholarly articles.
Click All Time to narrow your results to the most recent year, 5 years, or 10 years (labeled #2 in the screenshot below). If you want to choose a different time frame, click the All Filters button on the left.
Unfortunately, there's no button or filter to limit your results to research-based articles - you'll need to identify them yourself. There are two types of articles to look for:
Experiments or studies
Literature review
(Students in Prof. Powers' sections: she does not want you to use these.)
As you review your search results, there are a few things to look for which will help you figure out the difference between these types of articles:
Let's review a few examples. There are screenshots below, but links are also provided in case you want or need to review the item yourself.
The Title of the first example article is Culturally responsive literacy instruction: How is it reflected in the literature? The title gives us a pretty good idea that it is a literature review. You might see the phrases "literature review," "review of the literature," "systematic review," or "meta-analysis" in the titles of articles that are literature reviews.
The Abstract also gives us useful information, noting that the article is a "qualitative review of the literature."
In the Subjects section of this example article, we see "Literature reviews" is one of the assigned subjects. (It's underlined in red in the screenshot.)
The Title of the second example article is Listen to the Children: Elementary School Students' Perspectives on a Mindfulness Intervention. The title mentions students' perspectives; this suggests that the authors used some sort of tool or measurement to learn about those perspectives. Many article titles have words that indicate some sort of measurement - look for words like effects, impact, comparison, and others.
The Abstract builds on what we learned from the title; the students completed daily mindfulness activities, and the authors held weekly focus groups to learn their perspectives on these activities. The authors also mention doing a content analysis of the data they gathered from the focus groups.
The Subjects include the phrase "qualitative research," which is one major type of research (the other two are quantitative research and mixed methods research). The assigned subjects also include the phrases "focus groups" and "content analysis," which were in the abstract, too. Both are common data collection methods in qualitative research. For quantitative research, you might see the word "statistics" pop up in the subjects. (The relevant subjects are underlined in red in the screenshot above.)
If you're ever unsure whether an article includes original research, don't hesitate to ask a librarian or your instructor!
TL;DR: Read the beginning sections and the end sections - you can generally skip over stuff like methodology and results. Scholarly articles are usually written by people with advanced degrees (masters' and PhDs) for those same people. Most of us don't have the expertise or training to understand every section of a scholarly article.
Longer explanation:
