It helps to know this research terminology
Scholarly Resources: Each fact or opinion is documented (author provides a list of references with the title, author, and page number of the resource used).
Peer-reviewed Resources: Selected and approved by a panel of experts. This term usually refers to journal articles. Many online databases allow you to limit your searches to peer reviewed/refereed articles.
Popular Resources: Written for a lay audience. While the depth and quality of popular sources varies depending on things like who wrote them, whether they are edited, and for what purpose they were created, the thing that makes them distinct from scholarly/peer-reviewed sources is that the reader needs no special knowledge or expertise to understand a popular article. In popular articles concepts are often simplified, no technical language is used, and often there are no citations or references listed.
These questions can help in determining whether an article is a quality scholarly resource:
Author
- Is the author a recognized expert on the article's topic?
- Is the author affiliated with a college or university?
- Does the author have a master's or doctoral degree in a relevant discipline?
- Does the author seem to give a biased interpretation of the facts?
Article
- Is the article peer-reviewed? (you may need to Google the journal to figure this out)
- Does the article have a list of references / bibliography?
- How long is the article? (scholarly articles are typically 10+ pages)
- Does the article include primary research in the form of interviews, surveys, or data from a research study?
- Is information accurate and current? (look at the publication date and the dates of the sources being cited)
