Examples of scholarly sources are:
“When I think of scholarly material, I think it’s essentially written by scholars for scholars,” says Shawn Boone, EdD, associate dean of research at the College of Doctoral Studies at University of Phoenix (UOPX).
Many scholarly resources are also peer-reviewed.
Credibility: If you’re a student writing a research paper, scholarly sources help establish credibility.
Authority: A scholarly source can lend more authority than a news report or book. While a journalist or author might interview experts, a scholarly source actually is an expert.
Impartiality: A scholarly source offers findings that have been authenticated and should be free of confirmation bias.
This latter point is critical, says Rodney Luster, PhD, a widely published researcher, a regular contributor to Psychology Today, and chair of the Center for Leadership Studies and Organizational Research at UOPX. “We’re all passionate about the things we want to write about,” Luster says. “If we’re not careful, confirmation bias — interpreting new findings as confirmation of our beliefs — can creep in.”
True scholarly sources don’t allow this to happen.
Peer review is the independent assessment of a research paper by experts in that field. Peer review is designed to assess the validity, quality and often the originality of articles for publication. Its ultimate purpose is to maintain the integrity of science by filtering out invalid or poor quality articles.
According to Elsevier, peer review has been a formal part of scientific communication since the first scientific journals appeared more than 300 years ago. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is thought to be the first journal to formalize the peer review process under the editorship of Henry Oldenburg (1618- 1677).
Think about this: reading an anonymous blog full of uncited information that anyone could post -- or -- using an article that required five or six other authors in that same field to review, edit, and recommend improvements before it was accepted for publication.
What peer review does best is improve the quality of published papers by motivating authors to submit good quality work – and helping to improve that work through the peer review process. So at its best, peer review is a collaborative process, where authors engage in a dialogue with peers in their field, and receive constructive support to advance their work.
Peer review is vitally important to uphold the high standards of scholarly communications, and maintain the quality of individual journals. It is also an important support for the researchers who author the papers.
The peer review system is not without criticism. Studies show that even after peer review, some articles still contain inaccuracies and demonstrate that most rejected papers will go on to be published somewhere else.
However, these criticisms should be understood within the context of peer review as a human activity. The occasional errors of peer review are not reasons for abandoning the process altogether – the mistakes would be worse without it.
If you’re wondering how to tell if a source is scholarly, these characteristics are shared by scholarly references:
The CRAAP Test is an easy pneumonic tool to evaluate information.
There may be blogs or websites out there with no author and accurate, credible information. However, we cannot evaluate them. So best to stay clear of anything questionable and utilize resources we know are sound.