Library
WATCH Evaluating Resources (2:15)
A brief video about using the CRAAP test from Western University Libraries.
Evaluating Sources by Western Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
You might be asked to use scholarly sources for your assignment, but how can you tell what's scholarly or not? This list will help you to identify if the sources you have found are scholarly.
Author:
Audience:
Language & Length:
Review Process:
Appearance/Organization:
Location of Information:
Citations & Bibliography:
Examples:
Prefer to watch videos or like to look at visuals? Take a look at these resources to learn more about scholarly sources:
Tip: When searching for scholarly sources using Google or Google Scholar, you may come across articles available for free online (through sites like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and PubMed). Since most articles require an institutional subscription (such as accessing articles through RDP Library), are these sites credible?
Peer review is a process in which an article is screened and evaluated by a panel of experts before it is published. Reviewers will evaluate the article for quality, credibility, and accuracy.
Usually a journal is peer-reviewed when:
If you have found your article online in an article database, the database may indicate if an article is peer-reviewed. You can do an Internet search for your journal's name to see if the publisher's site can verify that it is peer-reviewed.
Many databases have an option for limiting to peer-reviewed journals. Look for options on the advanced search screen such as:
Note that sometimes more than one of these options can appear; journals can be scholarly without being peer-reviewed.
Peer-reviewed journals do contain information that is itself not peer-reviewed, such as editorials, opinions, or letters. Remember to evaluate your specific article, not just the journal.
Reading and critiquing scholarly research articles is a skill developed with time and practice. As you read more within your discipline you'll likely discover patterns in the structure of the journal articles. You'll also get more experienced at differentiating between good and bad articles.
Journal articles, particularly research articles in the sciences and social sciences, tend to follow a very similar structure. You may see some or all of the following headings:
Don't feel that you have to read research articles from beginning to end. The best strategy may be to read the abstract and then skip to the conclusions section, in order to get a feel for the main points of the article.
While journal articles in the humanities don't usually follow the structure noted above, you will at a minimum still see an Introduction and a References or Works Cited list.
The following questions may be helpful in determining whether you are reading a good scholarly article:
Red Deer Polytechnic recognizes that our campus is situated on Treaty 7 land, the traditional territory of the Blackfoot, Tsuu T’ina and Stoney Nakoda peoples, and that the central Alberta region we serve falls under Treaty 6, traditional Métis, Cree and Saulteaux territory. We honour the First Peoples who have lived here since time immemorial, and we give thanks for the land where RDP sits. This is where we will strive to honour and transform our relationships with one another.