Evaluate Sources

Credentials are the reasons why an author is a qualified, trustworthy expert in the topic being discussed. Some questions to ask about credentials could be: Where is the article published? Is it peer reviewed? Where did the author get their degrees? Do they have a degree in the subject area being discussed? If I google the author, what comes up? 

Scholarly Sources vs Popular Sources

When professors assign research projects, they may ask you for a certain number of scholarly sources. What exactly makes a source scholarly? Usually, a scholarly source is written by an expert or researcher in a certain field for other researchers in that field. Articles written for the general population, on the other hand, are usually called popular sources. Some popular sources are more reliable than others, for example, the US Census Bureau is probably more trustworthy than ireallylikenumbers.com. 

Common Popular Sources

• Newspapers or magazines
• Blogs
• Wikipedia pages
• Government or Nonprofit Orgs
• YouTube 

What is Peer Review?

In the wild world of academia, we talk a lot about using peer-reviewed sources. Peer-reviewed articles are scholarly sources that have been read and approved by experts from the field. Peer-reviewers look at the accuracy, the way the research was done, and the value of the paper in advancing the field. While there are some downsides to peer review, we still consider it the standard in academic and scholarly sources. 

The following are good rules of thumb to help identify peer-reviewed journal articles. Please understand that these aren't all true 100% of the time:

• They will begin with an abstract, or brief summary of the article's contents.
• They will be research-based and feature several citations. The citations may appear within the text or in a list of works cited at the end of the article.
• They will be longer than one or two pages - articles of this length are often book reviews or editorials.

Primary Sources, Secondary Sources, and Beyond

You may have professors ask you to use primary sources. A primary source is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created during the time you're studying. Secondary sources are articles, books, or other materials that talk about a time period, often using primary sources to do so. 

For example, a recording of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech would be a primary source, while a book talking about Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech would be a secondary source.