My professor wants papers written using "scholarly" and "peer-reviewed" sources. What are they?
Answer
"Scholarly" articles and journals are found by searching in one of the library's databases, not Google. The articles are written by qualified experts in the field and usually published in an academic journal. If an article is "peer-reviewed" it was read, reviewed and critiqued by other experts (their peers) in the same field before publishing.
- Articles from popular magazines are not scholarly. Journal of Clinical Psychology is scholarly; Psychology Today is not. If the publication has the words "journal of" in the title, it's a good chance that it is scholarly.
- Entries in Wikipedia are not considered scholarly, but the sources cited in them might be, depending on the subject. They can be helpful in gaining background information on your topic and gathering keywords to use in database searching, but the quality varies widely and since they are unsigned, the credentials of the authors can't be checked.
- Even though they might be published in a scholarly journal, book reviews and editorials within them are not considered scholarly articles. They are opinion pieces.
After a topic search in one of our available databases, you usually get a choice to select "scholarly" and "peer-reviewed" to filter the results. You can also narrow the results by date as shown in the example below:
