Most of the scholarly or peer-reviewed sources available are academic articles. You may also hear them called scholarly articles, scholarly papers, journal articles, academic papers, or peer-reviewed articles. These types of resources are typically a paper published in an academic journal after being scrutinized anonymously and judged to be sound by other experts in that subfield.
Academic articles are essentially reports that scholars or researchers write to their peers about what they’ve done in their research, what they’ve found, and why they think it’s important. Scholarly journals and books from academic presses use a peer-review process to decide which merit publication.
Be sure to evaluate scholarly sources for:
Structure: A full text article often begins with an abstract or summary containing the main points of the article. It may also be broken down into sections like “Methods,” “Results,” and “Discussion.”
Authors: Authors’ names are listed with credentials/degrees and places of employment, which are often universities or research institutions. The authors are considered experts in the field.
Audience: The article uses advanced vocabulary or specialized language intended for other scholars in the field, not for the average reader.
Length: Scholarly articles are often, but not always, longer than the popular articles found in general interest magazines like Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, etc. Articles are longer because it takes more content to explore topics in depth.
Bibliography or Reference List: Scholarly articles include footnotes, endnotes or parenthetical in-text notes referring to items in a bibliography or reference list. Bibliographies are important to find the original source of an idea or quotation.
This section on scholarly resources was adapted and recreated from Finding and Using Outside Sources by Katelyn Burton.
While the UM Libraries collections are resources are the best place to begin your research, it should be acknowledged that there are a multitude of valuable resources beyond the libraries’ collections.
When using resources outside of the libraries’ collections, you should make certain to effectively evaluate those resources using the following criteria.
Look at the first section of the website’s URL. What are the last three letters you see? Most likely, they are one of the following:
.edu: Educational (ex. university) sites. Are typically considered creditable, however, in addition to providing official publications and documents of the institution, individual students and professors can have their own personal pages under this domain, so you should still check the facts to ensure accuracy.
.gov: Federal governmental agencies. All branches of the U.S. federal government use this domain, and the information is considered credible.
.mil: Used by all branches of the Armed Forces of the U.S. As with. gov’s, the information from this domain is considered credible.
.org: Traditionally used for non-profit organizations. Information from these types of websites is typically unbiased (ex. The American Heart Association). However, some of these websites may advocate specific points of view and contain bias, the credibility of each .org should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
.net: Any type of website could be under this domain. The credibility of each .net should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Google Scholar: A free search engine focusing on scholarly literature, including articles, theses, books, and abstracts from academic publishers and organizations.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): A free extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world.
Education Resources Information Center (ERIC): A free database focusing on education-related literature.
PubMed: Specializes in biomedical literature, offering access to abstracts and citations from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
Science.gov: Access to articles and reports from multiple U.S. federal agencies
Your local public library will probably have electronic resources available for free use. These can vary depending on where you live and what your library provides access to.
In Mississippi, libraries have free access to various databases through MAGNOLIA, a project funded by the Mississippi legislature. MAGNOLIA provides access for Mississippians to EBSCO databases.
If you are a student at the Oxford campus, your local library is the Lafayette County and Oxford Public Library, a branch of First Regional Library. Visit their website to find out more about their online resources, including MAGNOLIA, but also test prep and language learning software.