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SOC 210N: Social Determinants of Health

This is the library course guide for SOC 210N. It is developed to help students describe the: social and economic factors that influence health and disease patterns, social and economic factors that contribute to health inequalities across populations, an

Interdisciplinary Databases

Subject Databases

Business & Education Databases

Environmental Science Databases

Historical Scholarly Perspective (journal articles)

Selected List of Scholarly Journals

Evaluating Scholarly Articles

How do I know if the article comes from a scholarly journal?

There are a couple of ways to do this.

Let's use the following ASA citation for our example:

Baltzell, E. Digby. 1976. “The Protestant Establishment Revisited.” American Scholar 45:499-519.

1. Searching Ulrich

Searching Ulrich's database (see below) for American Scholar" we discover that this magazine is published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and is not peer-reviewed or referred.

2. Browsing the journals website

If we search for the website of the journal Deviant Behavior you can explore the Aims and Purpose or the Instructors for Authors to determine if there is a peer-review process. You can also see that the journal is affiliated with the:

  • Mid-South Sociological Association (MSSA)

  • American Sociological Association (ASA)

Identifying types of articles in scholarly journals

It is important to understand that scholarly peer-reviewed journals publish other types of articles. These include:

Often these different types will be included in the article masthead.

Finally, a quick way to determine whether the article is an empirical study is to determine if the article has the general parts of a scholarly article:

title, abstract, literature review, methods and data, results, discussion and conclusion, and references.

These are discussed in this article: How to Read (and Understand) a Social Science Journal Article

Significance of the Journal & Article

Often the question will be asked, "Is this an important journal or article"? This is not always straightforward. There are a couple of ways that this is approached:

Citation Counts: Copy and paste the title of the article in Google Scholar to determine the "number of times it has been cited". This process will generally help you to discover the impact. "However, some things to consider:

  • If the article has recently been published it may not have had time to get cited.
  • If the article is about a unique or a new concept then the number of citations will be relative. 

Disciplinary Databases: each discipline has an important database associated with its publications. The important journals in the disciplines are targeted by these resources and often identified by the academic associations. For a list of library databases for Social Determinants of Health go to:  

Scholarly Journals in SOC 210N listed in this guide.

Journal Impact: Often certain journals in a discipline are cited more often than others. The Journal Citation Reports (see link below to the database) published by the Web of Science are often used to determine a journal's impact.