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The information on this page can be shared with students to help them as they research or work with unfamiliar sources. When searching online, it can be hard to discriminate from a scholarly article or a book review, etc.
Words used in the title can often give you clues about a book's intended audience or purpose. Scholarly book's usually have titles that sound more formal. For example, books with titles like Complexity and Evolution: Toward a New Synthesis for Economics have a much greater likelihood of being scholarly as compared to books with titles like Business Cat: Money, Power, Treats.
Timeliness and currency are important when selecting a book for your research. Whether or not a book is considered current will vary greatly depending on the discipline and the particular topic. Additionally, since it can take years to write and publish a book, if you're looking for the most up-to-date information available, you may need to consult other types of sources that have a faster publication cycle.
Authors of scholarly books cite their sources using formal citation styles like APA, MLA, Chicago, or others. These references may appear as parenthetical citations, footnotes, endnotes, or bibliographies. When evaluating the quality of a scholarly book, it's often useful to examine these citations to get a better sense of the relationship between the book and other scholarly work on the topic.
The text of scholarly books will usually have a more serious tone and use formal or technical language that may not be easily understood by a general audience.
Scholarly books are almost always written by professors or researchers affiliated with universities or research institutes. Some scholarly books, often called edited books or edited volumes, are co-authored by a group of people who are each responsible for a particular chapter. The editors of edited volumes are also professors or researchers.
Most scholarly books list their authors' and/or editors' credentials (i.e., affiliations with universities or research institutes, previous publications, and sometimes academic degrees). This information can be useful in determining whether someone is considered an authority on the topic they're writing about.
There are several different categories of publishers, each specializing in particular types of book. A quick Google search can tell you which of the following categories a publisher belongs to:
Scholarly books, e.g. Harvard University Press
Professional, technical, reference, textbooks, e.g. Wiley, Scholastic
Scholarly (often reporting research produced by members of the center or institute), e.g. Pew Research Center; Brookings Institution Press
Popular/mass-marketed, e.g. Random House, Penguin
Scholarly, Textbooks, e.g. Muse Open, National Academies Press
Professors often suggest that students include articles from scholarly, refereed, or peer-reviewed journals as resources for their research papers. These articles are authored by experts in their fields and reviewed by peers before getting accepted for publication. See the information below to help you distinguish between the three main types of periodicals.
Appearance: Highly visual, lots of advertising and photos.
Audience: General readership
Content: Popular magazines contain feature stories, reviews, and editorials, and may report research findings as news.
Articles:
Appearance: Sober design, little advertising, mostly text with some graphs and tables.
Audience: Students, researchers, scholars, specialists in a particular subject.
Content: Scholarly journals contain original research, theoretical issues, and new developments in the subject discipline.
Articles:
Appearance: Visual; some advertising related to the field, photos.
Audience: Members of a particular trade, profession or industry.
Content: Trade and professional journals contain news, trends, technical and practical aspects of the trade, profession or industry.
Articles:
Please note that not all articles found in magazines, or journals, will contain the noted characteristics. Use careful judgement in determining if an article in a scholarly journal actually presents in-depth, original research, or if an article in a magazine or trade journal goes beyond presenting news and current trends
Ask yourself these questions to help you critically evaluate a web page:
Example of a current webpage: American Cancer Society
A non-current / outdated webpage: Dole Kemp '96 and Yahoo
Note: Most information has some sort of bias that you may either agree or disagree with. It is important to identify the bias and understand how that applies to your research if you choose to cite a page.
Objective web page:
Biased web pages:
Fox News
Natural Resources Defense Council
Biased and misleading web page:
Blondes to 'die out in 200 years'
This page is not only biased, but it presents incorrect information. See question #7 to learn more about identifying fraudulent websites.
Search for the author/organization on other sites to check authority. Some websites have "accredited" stamps.
Authoritative source:
Non-authoritative source:
The Facts About Secondhand Smoke
Some official URLs:
University or other educational sites (.edu)
Government (.gov, .mil)
Non-Profit (.org) [no longer just for non-profits, please check.]
Some blog URLs:
tumblr.com,
wordpress.com,
blogspot.com,
blogger.com
Visit ICANN [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers] for a list of the most common top level domains.
Use Whois.net to see who has registered the domain name of the URL
Watch groups scan the web for misinformation, fraudulent, and fanatical web sites. Virtual Chase maintains an updated list of these groups.
Example:
http://www.dhmo.org/ is an intentionally fraudulent webpage that has the appearance of being official. Note the fake EAC logo:
Here is the official logo of the actual governmental organization.