Finding Peer-Reviewed Research Articles (Empirical Studies) in Sociology Journals

“Quotes” and the intitle: command

When searching for a phrase in Google Scholar use quotes to "lock" the phrase in place ...   e.g.,  "socioeconomic status"

The intitle: command allows you to search for a word or phrase in the titles of articles and books ...
e.g.,  intitle:"institutional change" ... 
e.g., intitle:discrimination  

Important - the intitle: command must be typed in all lower-case letters and the word or phrase to be searched must be immediately adjacent to the colon at the end of the intitle: command.

Set your publication date to recent years.

Google Scholar ranks your results in part based on the number of times an article has been cited.  Since it takes a while for even the best research articles to accumulate a large number of citations this means that Google Scholar will tend to display older research.

Since Google Scholar only displays roughly 400 results - it might be useful to reset the search results to multiple publication date options for topics that produce many results ... e.g.,  2000-2023 or 2010-2023 or 2020-2023 

Problems with Google Scholar:

If the journal that this article was published in is peer reviewed (refereed), a blue icon and a PEER REVIEWED label will appear in the OneSearch search result.

Though Google Scholar covers a vast expanse of research it is also very problematic. For each potential source you will need to answer the following questions:

Is this an article from a peer-reviewed sociology journal?

and

Is this an empirical study? (Is it a research article?).

Peer-reviewed sociology journal? Research?

Many of the sources in Google Scholar are neither journal articles nor research articles. A source found in Google Scholar might instead be a conference presentation, a thesis, a dissertation, a magazine article, or a student essay.

Many of the journal articles you encounter in Google Scholar are not from sociology journals but come from journals in other disciplines. 

Peer-reviewed sociology journal?

Click on the  Google Scholar  "Cite"  option under the record for your potential secondary source.  The journal name is found directly in front of the volume, issue, and page numbers. The journal name should be in italics.
  

To be sure you have a sociology journal article check the journal name against the List of Sociology Journals

In this case Qualitative Sociology is listed in the List of Sociology Journals

To be sure your article comes from a peer reviewed journal copy and paste the title "Reducing cybersickness in 360-degree virtual reality" into the Rod Library OneSearch database as demonstrated on the "Is it Peer-Reviewed?" page of this guide.

Research article? Empirical study?

You must inspect each article to determine if it is an empirical study. While many articles reporting quantitative research studies contain the sections Methods (or Method or Methodology), Results, and Discussion - quite a few will lack some of these sections and some research articles may not use any of those terms. Research articles reporting qualitative research may be even more variable. To be certain you should check with your professor ... or your librarian.