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Determining if a source is scholarly

For many college assignments, you will be asked to use scholarly sources. These are written by experts for a knowledgeable audience and usually go into more depth than books and articles written for a general audience. (Scholarly sources are sometimes called refereed or peer-reviewed because the work is evaluated by experts in the field before publication.)

To determine if a source is scholarly, look for the following:

Formal language and presentation
Authors who are academics or scientists, not journalists
Footnotes or a bibliography documenting the works cited by the author in the source
Original research and interpretation (rather than a summary of other people’s work)
Quotations from and analysis of primary sources (in humanities disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy)
A description of research methods or a review of related research (in the sciences and social sciences)

NOTE: In some databases, searches can be limited to refereed or peer-reviewed journals.

Go to related pages:

Selecting articles in databases

Selecting Web sources