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Library DIY for Online and Distance Students

A guide to getting started with Bradley library resources for students in online programs or studying at a distance.

Identifying Relevant Sources

Identifying whether or not a source is relevant to your topic is just as important as determining whether or not a source is credible. A relevant source is one that can contribute useful information to your assignment or to your understanding of your topic. Here are some things to consider when evaluating the relevancy of a given source.

  • What do you need? 
    • Your information needs will vary from assignment to assignment, as well as at different points in the assignment. Review your assignment carefully to make sure you know what kind of sources your instructor expects. Consider what you already know and what you need to learn in order to complete the assignment. Do you need more background information first? Do you need multiple viewpoints on a topic? Do you need detailed scientific information? You might list out all the things you need to know, and evaluate each source to see if it has answered any  of the questions you had about your topic.
  • What kind of source is it? 
    • Different types of sources - journal articles, books, newspaper stories, statistical data - will provide different kinds of information. They may also present information from different angles. See if the purpose of a source (for instance, a newspaper article) lines up with any of your information needs (for instance, providing the most recent developments in an ongoing event).
  • What level of evidence is presented? 
    • Especially for scientific literature, it's important to consider what level of evidence the source is presenting in support of its conclusion. Many fields of study will have their own hierarchies of evidence; become familiar with those that exist for your field. Then you can assess whether or not the evidence presented in a particular source is sufficient for your needs.
  • When was it published?
    • ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​How current a source is can have implications for how relevant it is. Especially in quickly-developing fields like the health sciences, make sure the information is up-to-date enough to apply to your research. Your instructor can give you guidance in this regard.

What are Peer-Reviewed Articles?

Peer-reviewed articles play an important role in the spreading of new research in a given field. These articles have the following characteristics:

  • They contain original research completed by experts in the field
  • Before being published, they have been reviewed both by editors and by the authors' peers, who are also experts in the field
  • The review process includes questioning the content, methodology, and findings of the article
  • Authors are expected to revise and improve their work based on feedback from this process before the article can be published

Peer-reviewed articles may also be referred to as research articles, scholarly articles, or academic articles. All these terms describe the same type of article.

Who publishes Peer-Reviewed Articles?

Peer-reviewed articles are normally to be found in scholarly journals. Scholarly journals are easiest to access through library databases, which often have features that can help you recognize this kind of journal. A journal that publishes peer-reviewed articles may also publish content that is not peer-reviewed, such as book reviews or opinion columns, so identifying a journal as scholarly doesn't mean everything inside it is a scholarly article. You'll need to evaluate the article by itself as well. However, confirming that the journal is scholarly and has a peer-review process in place makes it more likely that an article you find inside it will be peer-reviewed.

Here are ways you can identify a scholarly journal:

When searching in a database, search results will sometimes have icons next to them that indicate what kind of publication they come from. Here is one example from a psychology database.

Some databases may describe these journals as scholarly journals.

Here is an example from a nursing database.

Some databases may refer to these journals as academic journals.

In most databases, if you click on the title of the article, and then click on the title of the journal from the item page, it will give you more information about that journal, including whether or not it uses peer-review.

The information about the journal may be referred to as "Publication Details."

How Can I Recognize Peer-Reviewed Articles?

Peer-reviewed articles often follow very specific guidelines for how they are written and formatted. These guidelines may vary based on what discipline the author is doing research in, but generally a scholarly article will have the following attributes:

  • The authors' names are listed, along with any positions they may hold at academic institutions, indicating that they writing from their position as academics/researchers
  • An abstract, or summary of the article's contents, is provided at the beginning of the article
  • A list of references or works cited is included
  • The body of the article quotes or refers to work from other scholarly articles (check the references or works cited page to see if the quoted works were published in scholarly journals!)
  • The body of the article describes research performed by the authors, including their methodology or process, their results, and any conclusions they drew from their research

Articles that are not scholarly may sometimes include some of the same attributes as scholarly articles. To identify a scholarly article, look to see if the article has a majority of these characteristics.

Resources for Understanding and Identifying Peer-Reviewed Articles

Identifying Credible and Appropriate Sources

One method you can use to evaluate the credibility of a given source is the SIFT method. This method consists of four moves that help you look at the source in the larger information context around your topic. It is designed to be completed quickly so you can determine which sources aren't appropriate and which ones are worth more in-depth consideration.

It is also important to consider what kind of source you have found. Different sources have different strengths, and will have more or less credibility in different contexts. The infographic below can introduce you to considerations for different types of sources you might encounter.

Evaluating Nursing and Health Science Sources

Nursing and Health Sciences have specialized criteria for evaluating sources according to the principles of Evidence-Based Practice. More about Evidence-Based Practice and evaluating levels of evidence can be found in the guide linked below.

Evaluating Grey Literature

"Grey literature" refers to information that is released by organizations outside of the traditional academic or commercial channels of publication. This might include reports, white papers, government documents, evaluations, or other forms. Grey literature can contain a lot of useful information, but since it does not necessarily follow the editing or peer-review processes that traditional publishing entails, you'll want to carefully evaluate it before you use it.

Identifying Scholarly Books

Scholarly books are similar to peer-reviewed (aka scholarly!) articles in that they are written by experts in the field in order to share their research with a wider audience. Scholarly books are a way for scholars to go deeper into their topics than an article would allow. Some of the indicators of a scholarly book will be findable in the book itself; some things you will have to research on your own to discover.

Author

You should be able to find the author's name and at least a short biography or "About the Author" section. However, these can be quite brief and may not give you a clear picture of the author's expertise. It is worth it to search for more information about the author outside of the book; specifically

  • their educational and professional background (you want it to be related to what the book is about)
  • whether they are working for a research institution (such as a university)
  • whether they have published anything in this field before

Publisher

Scholarly works are usually published by publishers who specialize in academic content. These may be university presses (which are publishers attached to specific universities, and may publish on many academic topics) or publishers who focus on covering one or more related academic or professional fields. As with authors, it is worth it to search for more information about the publisher, including:

  • what other works they publish on that field/topic
  • what topics/fields they cover
  • what their editorial process is (ie, who decides what gets published and how)

Content/Approach

Similarly to scholarly journal articles, scholarly books are often written following a specific sort of approach. The purpose of scholarly books is to inform the audience of information from the field in question, including the findings of research. For some fields, this may not entail the results of studies, but rather what was found through studying and synthesizing primary and secondary sources on the topic (eg, a history book exploring how death was treated during the Civil War by examining letters, funeral programs, newspapers, etc.) Some of the hallmarks of scholarly books include:

  • extensive documentation of sources cited, either through footnotes in individual chapters or a list of notes/references in the back of the book
  • the presence of an index (many non-scholarly books also have indexes, but the lack of an index is a pretty good sign a book is not scholarly - and if it is a scholarly book with no index, then it's not a very good one)

Finding Sources That Cite Your Source

Investigate If An Article Has Been Cited Elsewhere

You can use Google Scholar to see what other sources your original article has been cited in, if any. These will likely be sources that build or expand on the ideas from your original article. In order to find out where an article has been cited, search for it in Google Scholar. When your article appears in the search results, look for the Cited By link underneath the result. It does not matter if the full-text of your original article is available in Google Scholar or not. Click on the Cited By link to see a list of articles that cite your original article.

the Cited By option under a google scholar result will return a list of other Google Scholar article that cite that article.

The articles that cite your original article may or may not be available in full-text through Google Scholar, but you can also search for them in library databases or order them through Interlibrary Loan/ILLiad. Some library databases also have a 'Cited By' feature that you can use the same way. The Cited By list just gives you articles to look for. If your original article is very new, you may not find anything this way, because researchers will not have had enough time yet to finish work that references the article.