Evaluating Sources: Scholarly Sources

Scholarly Resources: Scholarly resources are written with a focus on a specific subject discipline and usually written by an expert in the same subject field.  Scholarly resources are written for an academic audience.

Examples of Scholarly Resources include: Academic journals, books written by experts in a field, and formally published encyclopedias and dictionaries.  Read more about scholarly vs. popular resources in the content below.

Primary Sources: In historical research, primary sources are the original documents and artifacts around historical events. In other types of research, primary sources are original experiments published by the researchers who performed them.   

Examples of Primary Sources include:Photographs, letters, historical documents, data sets, and audio recordings. For non-historical research, empirical sources are the primary source. 

Peer Reviewed Journals:   Peer reviewed journals are evaluated prior to publication by experts in the journal’s subject discipline. This process ensures that the articles published within the journal are academically rigorous and meet the required expectations of an article in that subject discipline.

Empirical Journal Articles : This type of scholarly resource is a subset of scholarly articles that reports the original finding of an observational and/or experimental research study. Common aspects found within an empirical article include: literature review, methodology, results, and discussion.

- authored by Mary Beth Nipp, M.Ed., GCU Assistant Professor

Your instructor may require that you support your paper by using a scholarly source.  What does that mean, and how can you be sure your sources meet this requirement?

A popular source is just that - popular.  When you are reading People magazine at the dentist's office, or that non-fiction book on the bestseller list, these are examples of popular sources.  Scholarly sources, on the other hand, are written specifically to inform, not to entertain.  Let's examine other criteria that will help determine if the sources are popular or scholarly.

As you review this criteria, let the acronym "SPECIAL"help guide you in determining the significant differences between popular and scholarly sources.

Remember that the best way to find scholarly sources is also to select peer-reviewed sources from the GCU Library.

Peer reviewed sources are scholarly journals that require an impartial review by experts in the same subject field, who evaluate the quality, accuracy and validity of the research prior to publication.  This peer review process ensures that the articles published within the journal are academically rigorous and meet the required expectations of an article in that subject discipline.

 The "Special" Checklist to Evaluate Scholarly vs. Popular Sources: 

Journals vary in quality. Measures such as Impact Factor and indexing can help identify how respected a journal is as a publisher in its field.

Tips:

• Especially in the health sciences, research done in vitro (in a petri dish) and in animals may not actually hold when repeated with people .
• Research with a control group (no intervention) and an experimental group is more reliable than research without. 
• Research that is blinded—where the researchers don't know who is in what group—is better able to prove an effect than unblinded studies.
• Science experiments should be repeatable . 
• Because statistical flukes can happen, meta-analyses and systematic reviews from respected groups like Cochrane, which take a structured look at the existing research about a topic, are best able to reach a conclusion on how complete or established a scientific position is.
• Responses matter. Scientific publishing is a conversation, papers cite each other to agree or disagree. Collecting articles that refer to each other gives you a better picture of your topic. 

• In many databases the reference list includes links. You may need to search the title for full text access. However the publishers page, which the DOI will lead to, will have the abstract so you can see what the article was about.

What's Not in the Pyramid of Evidence?

There are some types of sources you may encounter that aren't on the pyramid of evidence. These sources may be useful for your understanding, but should not be cited as scientificevidence. Examples of these include: Blogs, magazine or new articles, and popular non-academic sites such as Wikipedia.

• These types of sources do not reflect primary research, nor are they an expert review of primary research the way clinical practice guidelines or systematic reviews are.
• They may refer to or summarize research articles. Locate the research article rather than cite a journalist's summary of it. Wikipedia will include linked citations to the original sources. 

A retraction is when an article is found to be flawed after publication. The journal may become aware after publication that serious math errors, fraud, or undisclosed conflicts of interest exist and retract the paper--in effect saying 'consider this unpublished'. Do not cite retracted papers unless you are talking about the retraction.