It's not hard to get on a computer and find material on any topic using Google. Finding articles in databases that meet your instructor's requirements takes more skill and evaluation, not to mention time.
Through the Cañada College Library, you have access to dozens of databases, each one containing hundreds of thousands of articles from journals, newspapers and magazines as well as videos. View the library's guide to databases on the library homepage.
Many papers you'll write in college require "peer-reviewed articles." The "peers" reviewing these articles are experts in the same field as the author; for instance, physics professors will review a physics professor's article.
Who are the peers in 'peer review'?
A professor or other expert submits their article to the editor of a journal in their field. For instance, a psychology professor might submit an article to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. A physicist would submit a paper to Applied Physics journal. The editors of these academic journals then ask the authors' peers - other professors or experts in this field - to evaluate the submitted articles. Those experts then submit their comments and reviews back to the editor, who returns them to the author, who answers the criticisms and rewrites portions of the article to satisfy his "peer" reviewers.
This lengthy review process explains why peer-reviewed journals - also known as scholarly or academic journals - publish only two or four times a year.
Your instructors want to know you can find peer-reviewed articles. This means using limiters to narrow your search results in databases to find these articles.
Librarians can help you with this.
Once in the database, words and phrases will fill in below as you type in the search field. This means that articles containing those subject terms (also called thesaurus terms) are in the database.
The next challenge is refining your search. The student wanted to write about how animal assisted therapy was used to help veterans. That's where the Boolean operators, AND, NOT or OR, which are built into the database will help. Using AND to add "veterans with PTSD" and using NOT to exclude PET scans, the student refined his search to articles for his paper. His instructor also required peer-reviewed articles of recent research, often meaning limiting to the last five or ten years. Here is how you find those.
On the left-hand side of the page in the illustration below, you will see "Limit To" above small boxes next to Full Text and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals and a slider bar with search fields for Publication Date.
Adding more specific search terms, using Boolean operators AND and NOT and limiters Full-Text, Peer-Reviewed and Publication Date will get you closer to articles you can use for your paper.