Click on the nested tabs below, and after you have a good understanding of the info on this page:
Start your search by finding background information
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Here we can see the cover of the book, the title and the author.
Within the first page of the book, you should expect to see information about the author. In the image below, you can see a small section that explains who the author is.
The author bio establishes the author's expertise in her field. By reading this biography section on her, we can see that she has a PhD, and has researched, worked and written in her field since 1990.
This image below shows a part of the text from one of the pages. Notice the presence of in-text citations. All claims are thoroughly sourced and backed up. Note too the academic tone and language of the text.
Finally, you should expect to see references - multiple pages of citations that give credit to the sources the author used during the research for the book. The image below is just that, showing that this larger work is thoroughly referenced. This is page 1 of 15 pages of references.
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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
Because a peer-reviewed journal will not publish articles that fail to meet the standards established for a given discipline, peer-reviewed articles that are accepted for publication exemplify the best research practices in a field.
Attribution: Much of the information in these boxes about the peer-review process was used with permission from the awesome librarians at the Lloyd Sealy Library at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Look through the images and notes below to learn more about the various parts common to a scholarly article
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The image above shows a book review and outlines important aspects or parts that can help you evaluate the source
Below, you can click on the link to access the full article where you can see the original PDF of the article as it appeared in print inside the journal.
Scholarly or popular? What is the difference? Why pick one over the other? And when? The research process is full of questions, but we're here to help! Use the tabs in this box to read more about these different types of sources and what they might be useful for. Then, move on to the rest of the guide to see how you can search for such sources.
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These articles are good both for finding recent information on a topic (what has happened in the last week or month) as well as finding out how historical events were reported in the past (for example, how was the AIDS crisis first reported in the 1980s?)
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These articles are good for summarizing information on a topic for the general public. They often provide a background, summarize research findings, and provide some analysis of a topic.
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*Sometimes called Professional Journals or Industry Journals
These articles are good to keep people in a particular field of work or trade (veterinarians, police officers, hotel managers, teachers, librarians, advertisers...etc.) up-to-date on trends in their line of work. Articles often summarize and analyze findings from scholarly research.
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*Sometimes called Scholarly, Academic, Peer-reviewed or Refereed
These articles are good to find results of scientific or academic research. They are written for scholars and provide in-depth analysis of a very specific area of your topic
Images: All images in this tabbed box were taken by GRC librarians