Research Skills  Tags: research catalog articles references databases www evaluating connectivity books skills assignments  

What is a Scholarly Journal?

Some guidelines are provide below to help you determine whether a journal you want to use is a scholarly one. These are general criteria, however, and if you are in doubt, you should ask a librarian or your professor.

Scholarly Journals (sometimes called Research Journals or Professional Journals)	Popular Magazines (sometimes called Journalistic Sources)
Articles always have bibliographies and end/footnotes.	Articles lack bibliographies or references.
Authors are always named, and their institutional affiliation is given.	Authors may be anonymous.
Articles may be peer-reviewed or refereed.	Articles are not peer-reviewed.
The target audience is academic or professional.	The target audience is the general public.
Journal title may include terms such as "journal," "review," or "bulletin" - but not always! Notable exceptions include The Wall Street Journal and Ladies' Home Journal.	The title doesn't usually include terms like "journal," "review," or "bulletin."
Journal cover and pages tend to be plain in design. Some scholarly or professional journals contain advertisements (like JAMA), so identify the target audience to make your final determination.	Journal tends to include advertisements, graphics, color photos, etc.
Issues tend to be successively numbered.	Each issue tends to begin with page 1
Articles tend to be longer.	Articles tend to be shorter, some only 1-2 pages.
Issues tend to be published less often (monthly, quarterly, semi-annually).	Issues tend to be published more frequently (monthly, weekly, daily).

The books, journal articles and Web sites recommended for your course will already have been evaluated for their quality by your instructors, so always start your assignment reading with these.

However, when you are asked to find your own information, you will have to judge its quality. For example, there is a lot of difference between an article on "diets which may prevent cancer" published in a magazine like New Idea and one that is published in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics which is a more academic source of information.

The following criteria can help you to evaluate any information you find:

Relevance
Currency
Reliability
Accuracy

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Relevance

To judge whether your information is relevant, check it against your assignment topic to see whether:

• it covers the main topic in enough depth and doesn't just cover less important issues
• the level is appropriate and the language is not too basic or specialized for you or your audience.
• the country and time period you are asked to discuss are covered
• the source is appropriate. You may have been asked to use 'primary sources' or first hand information from newspapers, autobiographies or interviews or 'secondary sources' (publications which quote other sources).

 

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Currency

Knowing when your material was published is very important when you evaluate it. Topics in rapidly changing areas such as medicine, computing and technology often demand very current information which you will find in recently published books, journals articles or on the Internet.

In some subject areas such as art, history, or literature, information that was published 5 or 10 years ago is often just as valuable.

To decide how current your material is, look at:

• the publication date of the book or journal article
• the dates of the references listed in the book or the article's bibliography/reference list
• the date that the Web page was last updated

If you cannot find these dates, you will have to use other ways to evaluate the information you have found.

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Reliability

Quality publications will give you the name of the author or the organisation that is responsible for the information. Be wary of any publications that do not give this information.

To decide whether your source is reliable, look for:

• details of the author's qualifications or the organisation where he/she works.
• details of the publisher.
• whether the journal is peer reviewed or refereed, meaning that the articles have been selected by experts in the same field.

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Accuracy

It may be difficult to tell whether the information you are reading is correct if you are not familiar with the subject area. Here are some things to look for:

• Information about the author or the organisation. Some organisations such as the Right to Life Movement, Greenpeace, gun owners groups, religious groups etc. will have their own point of view on political, economic or moral issues. Therefore, they may only give facts or statistics that support their own point of view.

   

• Are the sources of the facts given? Do the statistics come from reliable sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Food and Drug Administration ?

   

• Emotive or vague language often indicates only opinion, propaganda or marketing attempts rather than researched facts or evidence. (e.g. 'carrots may prevent ageing' or 'eating carrots is abominable' ).

   

• With World Wide Web documents, look at the domain in the URL. This tells you whether the organisation is a school, college or university (.edu.), a government body (.gov), or a commercial (.com) organisation. Government, university, or professional organisations may be more objective than a business wanting to sell you its products.

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