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.
Peer-reviewed articles play an important role in the spreading of new research in a given field. These articles have the following characteristics:
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.
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 A journal that publishes peer-reviewed articles may also publish content that is not peer-reviewed, such as book reviews or opinion columns, so identifying a journal as scholarly doesn't mean everything inside it is a scholarly article.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.
Here is an example from a nursing database.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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:
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:
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 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.