Challenge 3: Collect. Healthcare Group

Hey! For this week’s challenge we were prompted to search the internet and databases for peer-reviewed articles. Peer-reviewed articles are published works that have been critiqued and edited by experts in that field. Since these articles have gone through a vigorous publishing period they are more than likely credible. Being a psychology major I have gone through various classes teaching me the proper research methods for psychology. One of the major aspects of these courses was finding legitimate peer-reviewed sources to cite for our research. Using this previous knowledge I was able to quickly find suitable articles for my topic of Mental Healthcare.

The first search engine I used was this database called “Proquest”. I used Proquest because they have a useful filter that allows you to narrow your results to only those that have been peer-reviewed. Using this filter and narrowing my search to only articles that contain the phrase “Mental Healthcare”, I was able to reduce my results to a few articles about mental healthcare that had been peer-reviewed. The article I selected was a literature review on how mental practitioners are trained in hospitals in the U.S.

The second search engine that I used was google scholar. Google scholar is a great free database to use when you are looking for scholarly journals. One negative thing about google scholar however is that sometimes you do not have access to the full article that popped up in your results. When I searched for mental healthcare in google scholar I got thousands of results but after some digging I was able to gain access to an article published about how in Europe the demand for mental healthcare surpasses the supply of mental practitioners.

Overall, when looking for my articles I find that databases that you have to use through your library or school are usually more suitable in finding legitimate sources.