Your professor may ask you to find scholarly or peer reviewed articles for an assignment. Here is some terminology and hints on how to search for articles that you may find helpful.
A scholarly article is an article that has been written by a formally, highly educated individual that conducts research in a specific field.
A peer-reviewed article is an article that has undergone a review process conducted by scholars in the same field as the author. The scholars critically evaluate the article prior to publication in an academic or scholarly journal.
An academic or scholarly journal is a periodical that contains a collection of original work written by scholars conducting academic research in a particular field.
If you are unsure whether the information or source you have found is credible and appropriate for your assignment, consider the following questions:
- Can you locate the author(s) names?
- Does the author have the appropriate education and credentials to publish on this topic?
- Can you locate a publication date?
- If your source is a webpage, when was it last updated?
- Is the information recent enough for your research?
- Is the article biased? This can sometimes be helpful in developing an argument, but be sure to research both sides of an issue.
You may also use the "Chat with a Librarian" service for help in evaluating a source.
Some databases have the ability to restrict your search results to peer-reviewed articles only. You will see images of two example databases below. You may also wish to restrict your search results to full-text only so you know you are being presented with information the library has access to. You may also restrict the range of publication dates in some databases if that is important to your research.
If you cannot locate any search limit fields, look under the "Advanced Search" option when applicable.
