In PSY 1010, you may be asked to compare and contrast a news article summarizing a psychology research study, with a peer-reviewed psychology article on the same research study. Use this page for tips and resources for completing this assignment! Be sure to check with your instructor for the exact guidelines for your assignment.
Psychology is a fascinating topic that many people are interested in! However, scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed journals often use technical language and are so detailed they can be difficult for the general public to use. For this reason, psychology research studies are often summarized in popular news sources such as magazines and news sites like TIME Magazine, CNN, or The New York Times. You might see UVU research projects summarized in local news sources like The Salt Lake Tribune or Daily Herald! This makes psychology research accessible to more people, since you don't need formal educational training in psychology to understand the popular news article.
You can usually find psychology news articles with a search engine like Google, or by looking on news websites and searching for "psychology research." By contrast, peer-reviewed journal articles usually require using a library database and often aren't free to read online without a library subscription.
When you find a popular psychology news article summarizing a research study, look for clues in the news article to help you track down the original scholarly article about the study. Phrases like "a recent research study found" are a sign you're reading an article that's summarizing scholarly research available in more detail in a journal. Look for a link that leads you to the original article, the name of the researcher, the name of the journal, or a formal citation at the end of the article—you can use any of these details to help find the peer-reviewed article! If you follow a link and it takes you to a journal website asking you to pay to read the article, try copying the scholarly article title and then searching for it in the OneSearch database on the Fulton Library's homepage.
The following websites are examples of places you can look for popular psychology research articles. They do not include peer-reviewed articles.
Note: Not all psychology news articles summarize specific peer-reviewed articles, and not all peer-reviewed articles will be summarized in a popular article.
The following examples are a popular article from a news magazine and a scholarly article from a peer-reviewed journal. The popular article is a summary of the research study described in the scholarly article. Do not use these articles for your assignment! You'll need to find your own articles, using the tips in this guide. Your scholarly articles may need to come from an approved psychology journal—ask your instructor if you have any questions or see the list of commonly used psychology journals on the Find Articles page of this guide.
