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Research Help: Evaluating Resources

Using some tips courtesy of Purdue OWL

What is a Scholarly Resource?

Scholarly sources are accurate, authoritative, and current resources on your research topic. Scholarly sources can be found in a variety of formats but they share similar characteristics regardless of their format. The chart below can be used as a tool when evaluating sources.

Standard

Rigor

Audience

Professionals, Professors, Graduate Students, Research Community

Authors

The author is usually an expert or specialist in their field; name and credentials are always provided.

Bibliography

A bibliography and/or footnotes are always present to credit and document sources of information used in the included articles.

Editors/Review of Articles

Scholarly articles are usually reviewed and evaluated by a board of experts ("editorial board") in the field. This is known as "peer-reviewed" or "refereed." There may be a list of reviewers on the first few pages.

Focus

The publication has a narrow focus and targets a specific audience.

Illustration/Ads

Graphs, maps, statistics, or photographs that support the articles. These publications typically have few ads.

Language

The language is serious in tone and includes specialized knowledge or vocabulary.  Field-specific language/jargon, requires reader to be in touch with other research in the field.

Length / Type of Information

Publications include usually longer articles that present original research and original interpretation of data or in-depth analysis of topics.

Publisher

The journal is published by a scholarly association or publishing house.

Examples

Journal of African American Studies, Comparative Literature, The American Journal of Science

Evaluating Websites

Although information is easily available on the internet, websites still needs to be evaluated critically. In addition to the general guidelines for evaluating scholarly resources, the following questions can be used to help evaluate websites.

  • Who is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the website?

  • Are other information and links provided?

  • Is the site subject to influences over content, e.g., a commercial organization, a political organization?

  • Are the pages current and updated regularly?

  • Is the site user-friendly? Is there an index or site map or other navigation links to the site information?

  • Is the layout of the site professional or amateurish?

Useful Websites

Video Tutorial - Evaluating Websites
https://libguides.aamu.edu/c.php?g=338290&p=2278565
libguides.aamu.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-49
44410
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:WE4T3BFQ256VHMRNPOAQSHJRT7DDI7FO
<urn:uuid:06a14d9e-82e9-4eda-b15d-58eb6d92c55f>
2022-11-27T02:15:21Z
34.194.39.199
text/html
sha1:24HJJPQJEWAJDHJYEIV4XMENVE3GRMMW
<urn:uuid:57d1d441-a22f-4d9a-9c2c-89d6caf91abb>
https://libguides.aamu.edu/c.php?g=338290&p=2278565
response
<urn:uuid:31a7e2c0-77f6-4e81-bcb2-dc1cf43fa62f>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-49
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-11
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/