The first step in finding good resources is to know what to look for. Sites like Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia may be good for general searches, but if you want something you can cite in a scholarly paper, you need to find academic sources.

Scholarly and Peer-Reviewed Articles

A scholarly source is an article or book that was written by an expert in the academic field. Most are written by professors or doctoral students for publication in peer-reviewed academic journals.

The terms “scholarly article” and “peer-reviewed” articles are often used interchangeably, but there is a distinction.

Scholarly articles are written by subject-matter experts, often appear in journals, and include bibliographies, but may be passed off by a review board instead of undergoing the same amount of scrutiny as peer-reviewed articles. Databases typically have a checkbox you can click to search only for peer-reviewed content.

The Peer Review Process

Understanding the peer-review process gives insight as to why your instructors want you to focus on these resources.

First, hopeful authors send their article manuscripts to the journal editor, a role filled by some prominent scholars in the field. The editor reads over the manuscript and decides whether it seems worthy of peer review. If it’s not rejected and looks appropriate and of sufficiently high quality, the editor will recruit a few other experts in the field to act as anonymous peer reviewers. The editor will send the manuscript (scrubbed of identifying information) to the reviewers, who will read it closely and provide a thorough critique. Reviewers send their comments to the editor, who then decides whether to (1) reject the manuscript, (2) ask the author(s) to revise and resubmit the manuscript, or (3) accept it for publication.

Editors send the reviewers’ comments to authors along with their decisions. A manuscript that has been revised and resubmitted usually goes out for peer review again; editors often try to get reviews from one or two first-round reviewers as well as a new reviewer. The whole process, from start to finish, can easily take a year, and it is often another year before the paper appears in print.

Primary and Secondary Sources

While most scholarly sources are secondary sources, you will sometimes be asked to find primary sources in your research. For this reason, you should understand the differences between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.

• Primary sources allow researchers to get as close as possible to original ideas, events, and empirical research. Such sources may include creative works, first-hand or contemporary accounts of events, and the publication of the results of empirical observations or research. These include diaries, interviews, speeches, photographs, etc.
• Secondary sources analyze, review, or summarize information in primary resources or other secondary resources. Even sources presenting facts or descriptions about events are secondary unless they are based on direct participation or observation. These include biographies, journal articles, books, and dissertations.
• Tertiary sources provide overviews of topics by synthesizing information gathered from other resources. Tertiary resources often provide data in a convenient form or provide information with context by which to interpret it. These are often grouped together with secondary sources. They include encyclopedias and dictionaries.