How to use the GSU Online library to acquire peer-reviewed journal articles:

Abstract Guidelines

An abstract is a brief summary of a research article about a paragraph in length. Only articles pertaining to a disease or disease treatment from peer-reviewed journals can be used. If you don’t know what a peer-reviewed journal is, ask a reference librarian at Henderson Library! They would love to help. Peer-reviewed journals require that the article be reviewed by experts to verify its validity and accuracy. A few examples of peer-reviewed journals are: The American Journal of Nursing, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Science, and Nature. Articles from websites such as “Medical News Weekly”, “The Nature Freak’s Nutritional Blog and Cat Fancy”, and “Healthy Can Be Fun!” are not acceptable because there is no quality control over what gets published.

 

How to use the GSU Online library to acquire peer-reviewed journal articles:

 

1. Go to your mygeorgiasouthern.edu page

 

2. Find the “Library Resources” section

 

3. Click on “Library Home Page”

 

4. After the page loads, type your topic in the search bar

 

5. The results page will load. On the left of the page, under “Refine Results”, click the box next to “Scholarly/Peer Reviewed”. This will apply a filter so you only have peer reviewed articles in the results.

 

6. Pick an article that interests you and then click on “PDF Full Text” or “HTML Full Text” and then download. Don’t see “PDF Full Text” or “HTML Full Text”?, then pick another article that interests you.

 

You are required to submit two abstracts for this class. They should be typed, single-spaced, and roughly a paragraph in length. Be sure to cover the purpose, sample, results and conclusions. The purpose of the article is just a statement of why they performed the research that they chose. Often, you can just find that in the title.  If not, they should mention it somewhere in the text of the article. For example, “The purpose of their study was to determine if there was a connection between exercise and osteoarthritis frequency”. So, for that project, it would be impossible to include every human being on the planet. So, they must choose some part of that population that they are able to examine. That part is called the “sample” and would probably be something like “For this study, they examined 300 people. 150 males and 150 females between the ages of 35 and 75.”  Then tell the reader something about the results they found and whatever conclusions they came to such as “They concluded that running a marathon every day was bad for you and caused a lot more osteoarthritis in the knees”.

 

Also, you are required to provide a copy of the abstract that was published with the article you have chosen. DO NOT send or attach a link to the article. You must send the actual abstract or article as a photo file or .pdf. This is to ensure that you didn’t simply copy-and-paste the original article abstract and try to pass it off as your own. Original abstracts and your abstract must be submitted electronically. I will not accept hard copies or emailed versions.

 

So, ultimately, you will upload four separate .dox or .pdf files to the class Folio page:

 

1. article 1 that you read

 

2. abstract that you wrote about article 1

 

3. article 2 that you read

 

4. abstract that you wrote about article 2

 

Click on “Assessments” on the Folio page and then select “Assignments”. Upload your files to the “Abstracts” folder.