Need Better(More Authoritative) Sources?

Key Takeaways:

Need more authoritative results? Try:

  • Find out if your professor wants credible sources like well respected newspapers, magazines, websites, or if he wants scholarly articles written by people with PhD's. 
  • Find scholarly articles by filtering for academic/scholarly/peer reviewed journals and look for a lot of references at the end. 
  • Use Ulrich's, a library database, to check if a journal is peer-reviewed or not.  
  • An empirical article means there is original research. One study with methods, results and a discussion. A literature review summarized multiple studies on a topic.  

 

Did your instructor tell you that you need better sources? What they are most likely saying is you need more authoritative sources. There are a couple of search tips you can try to make sure that all the results that come back in a search are from reputable sources. As with all sources, you will still have to evaluate if the source you use is acceptable for your information need.

First understand what types of sources your instructor wants.

Some instructors are okay with magazines, newspaper articles, websites... written for the general public as long as they are considered credible (e.g. New York Times, National Geographic). Find out how to evaluate these popular sources.

Academic/Scholarly/Peer reviewed Articles

Others want you to use scholarly articles. They might use the term academic journal, peer review or scholarly to express the same concept. While the terms mean slightly different things, your instructor is most likely referring to articles that have been peer reviewed, a lengthy and arduous process that means not only were they written by subject matter experts(people with PhDs teaching in universities), but several other subject matter experts verified that the material is original, useful, and accurate. Learn more about the peer review process. 

Find academic/scholarly/peer reviewed articles

Academic articles can be found most quickly through the library databases.

Search for library databases by subject. 

Most databases enable you to filter content for academic/scholarly/or peer reviewed journals.

Limit to scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals

Identify academic/scholarly/peer reviewed articles

Sometimes other content will appear in these journals like book reviews or opinion articles.

You have to take a further step and make sure you are accessing a peer reviewed article.

The easiest way to do this while you are searching is look for the page count. 1-4 pages it is not a peer reviewed article(some peer reviewed articles from different countries might be this short, but make sure they are the best material for your information need before using them).If the article is over 10 pages, it is probably a peer-reviewed article.

This is not a peer reviewed article!

The image below shows a book review in a peer reviewed journal. Although it is marked as peer-reviewed, it is not a peer-reviewed article. It is easy to identify (for you or the person grading your paper) because it is 2 pages long. 

record for a book review from a peer reviewed journal

Once you have identified a possible article based on page count,  access the article and look for the following characteristics:

      1. Author's institutional information
      2. Abstract (some fields might not have this. Mainly from the humanities.)
      3. Methods, Results, Discussion (some fields might not have this. Mainly from the humanities)
      4. A lot of references

Note: Some articles in certain fields don’t have abstracts or methods because they do not apply to the type of research they do. In these cases look for articles over 10 pages that include author institutional affiliation and a long list of references.  

Peer reviewed articles look like this image from Kansas State University

Title page of a scholarly article with author institutional affiliation, title, and abstract called out

They have a lot of references at the end. 

References page from a scholarly article

Use Ulrichsweb to verify if a journal is peer reviewed or not

You can also use the library database Ulrich's to verify if a journal is peer reviewed or not. Connect to Ulrich's and search for a journal title. You can only perform journal title searches in Ulrich's. 

The search below for The Journal of Fandom Studies show that it is a peer reviewed journal by portraying an icon that looks like  a referee shirt. Peer reviewed journal are also know as refereed journals. If this is unclear you can click on the title and it will clearly tell you if the journal is peer reviewed or not.    

Search results for Journal of Fandom Studies in library database Ulrich's. Referee shirt shows it is peer reviewed.

Check your comprehension

My instructor asked for Empirical/Original Research or a Review?

Sometimes an instructor will specify that they want original research or empirical research or that they want you to find a literature review of the research that has been conducted on a certain topic.  

The image below summarizes the differences between empirical or original research and reviews. Empirical research is an original study. There will be a methods section and results because something was tested. A literature review summarizes research that has been conducted on a certain topic. There is no research done for a literature review. Instead it summarizes the results of a lot of different articles.

Depending on the database you are searching in you might be able to filter for empirical research or reviews from the advanced search menu. Regardless, you will need to view the article to see if they conducted original research to distinguish between the two.  

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Why peer review?

The graphic below from The American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA) illustrates a typical peer review process. Link out to the ASHA peer review process Links to an external site., or just think about the amount of steps a well researched article written by an expert in the field goes through before being published in a peer reviewed journal.

Peer review cycle. Articles are reviewed by an editor and two reviewer who can reject, suggest edits, and approve.

 

This video from North Carolina State University explains more about the peer review process.

Scholarly articles.
00:01
Academic articles.
00:03
Peer reviewed articles.
00:05
You may have heard these terms used by your professor,
00:08
but what do they mean?
00:09
Essentially,these are all different ways of describing the same thing:
00:13
research articles that have been published in scholarly journals.
00:17
But what is a research article,
00:19
and how does it get published in a scholarly journal?
00:22
First of all, the article reports a scholar's research practice and findings.
00:26
And, it's written with an audience of other researchers in mind.
00:30
Finally, in order to be published and accepted by the scholarly community,
00:34
the article must pass several quality tests.
00:36
The most important of these tests is called peer review.
00:41
We can get a better understanding of the role of peer review
00:44
if we look at the academic publishing process as a whole.
00:47
Let's imagine a researcher
00:49
who wants to share a discovery with the academic community.
00:52
To do this,
00:53
he writes a draft article describing his research and findings
00:57
and submits it for publication in a scholarly journal.
01:00
Here's where the article has to pass its first test:
01:03
The journal's editor reads over the article to decide
01:06
whether it's a good fit for her journal.
01:08
If it is, she sends copies of the article to a group of experts
01:12
to evaluate the article's quality,
01:13
in a process called "peer review".
01:16
This is the article's second, and most important, test.
01:20
These experts are the author's "peers",
01:22
since they are working in the same research area.
01:25
And since they are making a judgment about the article,
01:27
they're sometimes called referees --
01:30
so peer reviewed articles are sometimes called "refereed articles".
01:34
Each reviewer evaluates the article
01:36
by asking questions to judge the quality and significance of the research.
01:40
Questions like,
01:41
"What is this research about?"
01:43
"Is it interesting?"
01:45
"Is it important?"
01:46
"Is the methodology sound?"
01:48
"Are the conclusions logical?"
01:50
and "Are the findings original?"
01:53
Based on the answers to these questions,
01:55
the reviewers decide whether the article is worthy of publication in the journal.
02:00
They then make a recommendation to the editor --
02:02
either approve the article for publication, or reject it.
02:06
Even if they recommend publishing the article,
02:09
they usually expect the author to make revisions.
02:11
The editor, however, makes the final determination
02:14
whether the article should be approved, rejected, or revised.
02:19
Rejection is common, though.
02:21
The most prestigious journals are very selective about the articles they publish,
02:25
so they tend to have high rejection rates:
02:27
some journals reject more than 90% of the submissions they receive.
02:32
From the time the researcher first submits his draft article
02:35
to the time it is finally published,
02:37
several months - or years - may have elapsed.
02:41
Once the journal is published,
02:42
it is made available to subscribers,
02:44
which are usually university libraries,
02:46
because individual subscriptions are very expensive,
02:49
often hundreds or thousands of dollars a year.
02:52
By the way, like all established systems,
02:55
the peer review system has its critics,
02:57
and scholars continue to think about how
02:59
the peer review process might be improved.
03:02
The library has tools to help you find peer reviewed research.
03:06
If you want to know more about the peer review process
03:08
or need help finding peer reviewed articles,
03:11
ask a librarian for help!

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