What type of sources

Many of these publications are "peer reviewed" or "refereed". This means that scholars in the same field review the research and findings before the article is published. Articles in scholarly publications, in most cases:. To see the typical components of a scholarly journal article check out the Anatomy of a Scholarly Article page from North Carolina State University Libraries.

There are many occasions on which reading articles from popular sources can help to introduce you to a topic and introduce you to how that topic is being discussed in society.

Articles in popular sources, in most cases:. Trade publications are generally for practitioners. They are focused on a specific field but are not intended to be "scholarly". Rather, they communicated the news and trends in that field. When you are determining whether or not the article you found is a peer-reviewed article, you should consider the following. It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.

If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. Research Help. Loyd Sealy Library In academic publishing, the goal of peer review is to assess the quality of articles submitted for publication in a scholarly journal.

Before an article is deemed appropriate to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, it must undergo the following process: The author of the article must submit it to the journal editor who forwards the article to experts in the field.

These impartial reviewers are charged with carefully evaluating the quality of the submitted manuscript. The peer reviewers check the manuscript for accuracy and assess the validity of the research methodology and procedures.

If appropriate, they suggest revisions. If they find the article lacking in scholarly validity and rigor, they reject it. Primary Vs. Secondary Sources Primary Vs. Scholarly vs. Popular Periodicals. Contact a Librarian. Research Center Librarians. Email Me. JavaScript disabled or chat unavailable. Often you would want to use a tertiary source to find both Primary and Secondary sources. Keep in mind that, too, that it may sometimes be difficult to categorize something as strictly tertiary, and that it may depend on how you decide to use the item in your research and writing.

Your instructors will often not accept the sole use of tertiary sources for your papers. Instead, you should strive to only use tertiary sources to find more academic sources , as they often have titles of other works and links f they are web-based to more academic primary and secondary sources that you can use instead.

Tertiary sources can be popular or academic depending on the content and publisher. Examples of tertiary sources include:. Now that you know what kinds of sources exist, it is important to remember that various disciplines find certain types of evidence to be more acceptable and appropriate than others. For instance, while the Humanities may consider anything from passages of text to art appropriate evidence, certain sciences may prefer data and statistics.

What is most important to remember, no matter the discipline for which you are writing and pulling evidence, is that the evidence is never enough by itself. You must always be sure to explain why, and how, that evidence supports your claims or ideas. You can also look in article databases to find credible, non-academic sources. Scholarly or specialized sources are written for readers with some background in the particular topic.

For example, someone with a background in science should be able to easily read and understand the articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. However, even if you are not a specialist in the field, your initial reading of overview material and information from credible sources written for the general public should enable you to use some specialized material.

Scholarly articles are the result of rigorous research and analysis. They usually provide strong, researched, logical evidence for claims. To be published, scholarly articles and books have to be peer-reviewed, which means that other known scholars in the field have to evaluate and recommend those articles for publication.

You usually can find scholarly articles from databases that draw from academic publications. To determine if a source is scholarly, look for the following characteristics:. If your working thesis deals with the benefits of regular exercise for older adults in their 70ss, you may blend evidence from primary sources uninterpreted data from research studies, interviews with older adults or experts in the field with secondary sources interpretations of research studies.