For the most part, you're going to want to search ProQuest to find articles. So in this video, we'll look at some of the different types of articles that you can find in ProQuest.
Let's search for information about how watching comedy movies can help people cope with depression. We'll type the following into the search box. "Watching comedies" in quotation marks, AND "depression". Make sure full text is selected, and we'll hit search.
At this point, let's filter it to "scholarly journals." There are two ways to do this. You can limit it to "peer reviewed," which is another term for scholarly information. And you can also just click "scholarly journals" under "source type." Now everything in your results is a scholarly journal article.
So what exactly is a scholarly journal? Scholarly journal articles are research articles -- sometimes studies or experiments. There are three characteristics about scholarly journals that make them different than just a regular article out of a newspaper or a magazine. One is the authority. Just like with a book, the authors of scholarly journal articles are experts in their field. They can be scientists, or doctors, or college professors, or professionals in a medical field for example. They are usually experts on the topic that they are researching. That means they have credentials and have studied in that field. The second characteristic that sets them aside from a news article is that the content is usually primary research. They're studying something that's never been studied before in order to answer a research question or a hypothesis.
So for the topic of watching movies to help cope with depression, a good scholarly journal article might be an actual study or an experiment that was done that compared people who watched movies and people who did not watch movies to see if there was a difference in their levels of depression afterwards.
The third characteristic is their accuracy. Because they follow scientific methodology, go through a rigorous peer review process before publication, and because they often make reference to other scholarly research that's been done, the information in a scholarly article is pretty valid and accurate. Scholarly journals never contain an opinion -- it's always a conclusion based on facts.
So here's an example of an experiment that was done to see if watching movies can help with depression. We’ll click on this one: "Movie Watching During Dialysis Sessions Reduces Depression and Anxiety and Improves Quality of Life: A Randomized Clinical Trial."
I'm going to click on "Full text PDF" and we'll get the actual image. This is what the article looks like in the print publication. It was published in the scholarly journal called Complementary Therapies in Medicine.
So, we'll look at the title first and see if that gives us a clue as to what they studied. It looks like they studied how watching movies during dialysis treatment reduced patients’ anxiety and depression. Just about all scholarly journal articles have an abstract at the top. An abstract is a summary of the article. The summary of the article shows how they conducted the study and what the results were.
They conducted their study by using two different groups of patients: a control group, which didn’t get to watch movies while receiving dialysis treatment, and an experimental group, which did get to watch movies while receiving dialysis treatment. The patients who watched movies while receiving their treatment experienced less depression, less anxiety, lower hypertension, and fewer headaches than the patients who didn’t get to watch movies while receiving their treatment. They concluded that watching movies is a good stress reliever while undergoing this type of treatment.
One thing to point out about scholarly articles is that they are sometimes limited. They often do provide scientific evidence in a lot of cases like in this article -- which was an actual experiment done to determine if watching movies could help with patients undergoing dialysis treatment. But this study only focused on dialysis patients. What about other types of patients in the hospital? Or people outside the hospital? Also, we’re not entirely sure what types of movies were shown. Were the movies ones that they knew the patients would enjoy watching? Were the movies randomly chosen? This study, also, does not attribute any cause. It doesn't talk about why movies might help with depression, because it doesn’t focus on movie selection as part of the experiment. So scholarly articles are sometimes very focused on determining certain facts, and that's sometimes it.
If we go back to our search results, let's see if we can find an article that puts movie watching into better context. For that, we'll look for a popular article -- something from a magazine or newspaper that is written to inform the public. Let's get rid of the filter for "scholarly journals" over on the left. Also make sure you turn off "peer reviewed."
Now we'll click the filter for "newspapers" under "source type." Since news is constantly updated, you'll see a lot of examples of how movie watching can improve mental health.
So a popular article is different than a scholarly article. Remember that for scholarly articles, the author is an expert in the field. That's not the case for a popular article. Usually those are written by journalists or reporters. They might do some investigating, but they aren't usually a scientist who's conducting original research on a topic. Popular articles are written for the general public. Their purpose is to inform. They also put scientific studies into context.
The scholarly article only looked at movie watching within a hospital setting with a specific group of patients. A news article will try to put that research into greater perspective.
Let's take a look at this article from a newspaper from Cape Town, South Africa: "Crime: 10 Ways to Improve Your Mental Health."
This article is talking about the crime rate in South Africa and how it is causing a lot of anxiety in people. It suggests different ways on how to protect yourself and take care of your mental wellness. One of the suggestions is to turn off the news and social media and to choose more uplifting content, such as reading or watching movies. This causes a person not to be so stressed out all the time.
So the scholarly article showed us an experiment that was conducted to show that watching movies can improve the mental health of dialysis patients, and this newspaper article gives us a broader context that shows us an example of what people can do to cope during troubling times.
Don't forget that once you find an article, you'll need to locate the MLA citation so you can cite your sources. From the article, click on "Cite" at the top right.
The box that pops up defaults to an MLA 9th Edition citation. Copy and paste this into your Works Cited page.
Next, you'll get a chance to take a closer look at the two articles that we just found: the scholarly article about dialysis patients watching movies to help with depression, and the newspaper article from South Africa that talked about ways to cope with stress during difficult times.