Understanding Scholarly Information: An Introduction

Start your research by entering your topic in the search box below, then click "Search."

Everyday, we use information from some place to answer our questions.  Where is my friend's new house?  Where is the cheapest gas? Is it healthy for my pet to eat bubblegum all day?  What is the relationship between the rising costs in the housing market and job growth in my town? 

Depending on the type of answer you are looking for, or the type of research you are doing; the places you go to find information can be very different from one another.   All research involves asking a question.  So, before you ask your question, you should think about why you are asking it, and where you want your answer to come from. 

If you are looking for the cheapest gas, then using an app on your phone, or looking it up through Google will most likely get you the answer quickly and accurately.   

However, if you are assigned a research project for your class that asks you to explore the rates of housing costs and their relationship to employment opportunities, then the research process just got a little bit more complicated.   Here's where this tutorial comes in.  This guide will walk you through what scholarly information is, where to look for it, how to identify it, and best practices for using it in your academic research projects.

video courtesy of: Carnegie Vincent Library at Lincoln Memorial University.

Deciding on a starting place to find scholarly information for your research project can be tough.  There are a lot of options out there, in terms of types of sources (newspapers, books, magazine, journals, T.V.) and access points (library database and websites).  Here are a couple things to consider before diving into the giant ocean of information that is out there.

• How much do I know about this topic?  If I'm starting from a completely unaware place, I may want to use encyclopedias and other general sources to find out more about the specificity of my topic. 
• How much time do I have?  The obvious answer, is very little to none, probably.   So, make sure you use your research searching time wisely.  Choose databases from a Library rather than trolling the whole Internet for sources.  The Library databases are a great time saver, since they collect information specifically for the use in academic research. Remember not all the information is scholarly, but it is a much smaller pool of information to search through.  Less "fluff" and more peer-reviewed sources, makes it a time saver every time.
• What type of source information is being required for this project?  If you are doing a large quantitative research project, then you will need to find those scholarly, peer-reviewed publications.  If you are not required to use that level of information for your research, still think about what a credible source is, and use that information to make your searches more effective. 

We've all heard the word before; credible. But what does credible mean to us, as an academic researcher?  To complicate matters, you'll also hear other terminology that goes along with credible.  Words like, scholarly, peer-reviewed, academic, and authoritative can be confusing when used without context; but good news, all these words describe the same type of information.   So it's important to remember that all the above could be used interchangeably by your teacher, or someone who you are doing research for/with.    

So, now we know people use different words to describe information that is appropriate for use in academic research, and that is great; but now the question is, how do we know what it looks like when we try to find it? Here's a checklist that you can use when determining the credibility of a document/piece of information.