Sierra, a WCC student, recently asked a librarian about how to find an article “about anything human sexuality wise that involved an experiment BY the author, it cant be like the author writing about someone else’s paper kind of thing.” Authors do steal each other’s work sometimes, it’s true, or sometimes they do their own analysis of someone else’s data.
There is a hierarchy of evidence in sources that you should be aware of. Here’s an image model that shows filtered information at the top (articles using outside data), then primary sources where the author did the experiment themself, and at the bottom where there was no design or humans.
You can use the type names of those layers when you search to get articles with experiments by the author. For example:
- sexuality and “randomized controlled trial” articles in OneSearch
- sexuality and “cohort study” articles in OneSearch
- sexuality and “case control study” articles in OneSearch
You can see I put the type names in quotation marks so those words would stick together during the search. You can use that strategy in other health databases, too. Also, this isn’t guaranteed to be 100%, so definitely check the Methods section of the article to be sure it’s what you want!