With the explosion of information available at your fingertips, it is more important than ever to evaluate your sources.
You will likely be asked to find scholarly or peer reviewed sources.
Scholarly sources, also called academic sources, consist of sources that distribute academic research and scholarship. Most scholarly sources are published in academic journal or book form. The authors of scholarly sources are typically scholars and academics, including faculty and students, with known institutional affiliations. The intended audience for these materials is typically researchers, scholars, academics (faculty and students), and other highly informed readers.
You may also hear scholarly sources reviewed to as peer reviewed sources. Peer review is a common, though not universal, process in scholarly publishing whereby a work is reviewed by other experts in the field before publication. There are a variety of styles of peer review, with varying levels of anonymity for the author and reviewers and transparency to the reader. Peer review is intended to evaluate the quality of the scholarship, and ensure that only high quality scholarship is published. If mistakes are made, or research findings are later found to be inaccurate, reputable journals have systems of issuing corrections and retractions to their readers.
When evaluating these sources, look for the following pieces of information:
When you've found a useful resource, look at its References/Citations, and then track down those articles using our databases. Some databases (PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, ScienceDirect) will even include a list of Cited References:
Some databases (PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, ScienceDirect) provide you with Cited By information. Essentially, Cited By tells you what other articles cited the initial article you were reading. Below are two images of this, the first in ScienceDirect, and the second in PsycARTICLES.
Subject Searching:
To find subject headings for your topic:
Another way to find subject headings:
Subject samples in the search results:
Or after clicking on the article title in the search results:
Subject headings describe the content of each item in a database. Use these headings to find relevant items on the same topic. Searching by subject headings (a.k.a. descriptors) is the most precise way to search article databases.
It is not easy to guess which subject headings are used in a given database. For example, the phone book's Yellow Pages use subject headings. If you look for "Movie Theatres" you will find nothing, as they are listed under the subject heading "Theatres - Movies."
Keyword searching is how you typically search web search engines. Think of important words or phrases and type them in to get results.
Here are some key points about each type of search:
Keywords
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Subjects
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Info modified from: http://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=175963&p=1160804