Geography courses / Kheirabadi: Evaluating Sources & Peer Review

When you have a research assignment, be sure to figure out what types of article sources are required or allowed. Some professors require you to use only scholarly peer-reviewed journals while others might let you use a variety of journals.

Scholarly article: Also known as peer-reviewed, academic, or refereed, these articles are written for researchers and experts and usually share the results of a research study. Scholarly articles are written by experts in the field and are reviewed by expert peers. In many databases, you can limit your search to scholarly, peer-reviewed, or refereed journals to weed out any non-scholarly content. Scholarly article example

Professional/trade article: Written for people working in a specific field. Articles can be written by experts in the field or by staff writers. The articles are only reviewed by journal editors, so they go through a less rigorous review process. Trade article example

Popular journals: Written for a general audience rather than for professionals or scholars, and written by journalists. Examples include The New Yorker, People, and Rolling Stone. Popular article example

This quick quiz from the Ithaca College Library will test your knowledge and help you learn to tell the difference between different types of journals.

For any type of source:

• Look up who wrote it. Are they a scholar affiliated with a university?
• Most scholarly sources will document where their information came from with a works cited/bibliography/references at the end of their publication.
• When in doubt, just ask a librarian.

If it's a journal article:

• If you found the article in JSTOR you know it's from a scholarly journal since all of the content in this database is from peer-reviewed journals.
• If you found the article in Academic Search Premier or the Library Article Search and limited your search to "Scholarly (Peer-reviewed) Journals" then you know whatever you found is from a scholarly journal.
• If you're not sure a publication is scholarly, just Google that journal. Look at the official web page for the journal or a Wikipedia entry for the journal. The chances are good that one will make it clear whether or not the journal is peer-reviewed (it might also use a term like refereed). If it is peer-reviewed, then it's a scholarly journal. On the journal page, look for a page called something like "Instructions for reviewers" (which indicates that there are peer reviewers for the publication. 

If it's in a book:

• Look at who published the book (it should state it in the first few pages). Is it a university press? The publisher's name will have the word "University" in it.
• Look up the author. Are they affiliated with a university?

If it's from the Web:

• Just because you found something through a Google search doesn't mean it can't be from a journal or book. Scholars frequently make their journal articles and book chapters available via the free web in a university repository or on their own website. Make sure it's definitely not a journal or book chapter first.
• Another type of thing you might find online is a conference paper. These often look a lot like scholarly journal articles (they are written by scholars and include references to other sources), but are published as part of a conference presentation. It should say somewhere in the document which conference it is written for. These are scholarly.
• Is the website associated with a university?
• Is the author of the website a scholar affiliated with a university?