What is a Scholarly Article, and how do I find one?
Your instructor might ask you to use scholarly sources for a paper or other assignment. This FAQ will discuss what that means, how you can tell whether an article is scholarly or not, and database tools that can help you find scholarly sources.
What is a scholarly source?
Most people never encounter scholarly sources outside of a college or other classroom setting. The following characteristics are what make a source scholarly:
- It is written by a scholar--someone who professionally studies a certain field. Most scholars work for colleges or universities. In some fields, such as medicine and allied health, practitioner-scholars both work in the field (for example, in a hospital or clinic) and conduct scholarship.
- The intended audience is other scholars. Usually, scholars write for other scholars in their field, but the intended audience may also include scholars in related fields.
- It describes original research that the writer has done. In science and social science fields, research is usually an experiment, study, or systematic observation that the scholar has carried out, either in a laboratory or a real-world setting. In the humanities, it may be sustained, original analysis of some piece of culture.
Scholarly sources are also often peer-reviewed or refereed. This means that, before the article is published, it is read by other experts in the field who assess its validity. They look at things like whether the research method is suitable for the field of study, whether the evidence points to the conclusion the author reached, and whether the author has made any mistakes.
These characteristics are what make an article scholarly, but it can be hard to tell if an article meets these criteria without reading the whole thing and maybe looking up the author's credentials. The next section discusses some features that are usually associated with scholarly work, that you can easily spot when you're looking at an article in a database.
What can I look for to tell if an article is scholarly?
In this section, we'll talk about some features that scholarly articles usually have. Not all scholarly sources will have every single one of these features, and having them doesn't necessarily make an article scholarly, but they can help you tell, without reading the whole article, that it is probably scholarly.
- A very specialized topic. Scholarly articles usually discuss a very narrow, carefully-defined aspect of a topic. For instance, a "popular" article, intended for the general public, might talk about "New medications for heart health." A scholarly article is more likely to look at the effects of one particular medication, on a specific population: "the effects of X medication on African-American women over 60 in an intensive-care setting," for example.
- A long article. Because a scholarly article discusses a complex topic with a high level of technical detail, they're usually a lot longer than a popular article on a similar subject. The usual length of a scholarly article varies from one field to another, but they're usually at least several pages long, and in many fields, articles of 20-30 pages are not unusual.
- Citations. Most scholarly articles describe original research, but they will also usually include some review of prior research on the topic. A scholarly article will almost always have in-text citations and a bibliography, works cited, or list of references, in a formal citation style such as MLA or APA.
- Few or no illustrations. Scholarly articles are usually mostly text, and sometimes graphs or tables to display data. Illustrations are used when necessary to understand the text; for example, there may be a photograph of an artifact that is being studied, or a diagram of how an experiment was set up. If an article has illustrations that don't convey essential information, but just make the article more interesting or visually appealing, it's probably popular rather than scholarly.
- Appears in a scholarly journal. Scholarly journals are periodicals that focus on a specific field of scholarship. Often, they are published by universities or by professional organizations for scholars in a particular field. The titles will usually have the name of the field, and often a word like, "Journal," "Communications," or "Proceedings," or "Annals."
Is there a quicker way to tell if something is scholarly?
Yes! Most of LCCC's databases allow you to filter for scholarly articles. These tools aren't perfect: for example, sometimes scholarly journals have a small amount of nonscholarly content, such as opinion pieces, reflective essays, or news about the field, and the database will often categorize these things as scholarly. But using these tools is a great first step when you're looking for scholarly sources.
In the next sections, we'll look at how to use these tools in some of our most frequently-used databases.
How do I filter for scholarly articles in EBSCO?
EBSCO offers many databases, which all use the same interface. It looks like this:
You can filter for scholarly sources by clicking the check-box right here on the basic search page:
I've circled the box in green in this illustration.
You can also apply this filter from your results page, after you have started a search. It's near the top of the "refine your results" menu on the left-hand side of the screen:
The check-boxes are circled in green on this illustration. The "References Available" checkbox usually returns a very similar results set to the "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed)" box.
How do I filter for scholarly results in ProQuest?
ProQuest is another vendor that provides a lot of our databases. The front page of a ProQuest database looks like this:
In ProQuest, it's easiest to start your search, then add the "scholarly" filter from your results page:
The filtering tools are located in a menu on the left-hand side of the screen. You can use the "peer reviewed" checkbox in the top section of the menu, or select "scholarly journals" in the "source type" section, circled in green in this illustration. Both options will have similar results.
How do I filter for scholarly results in Gale databases?
The Gale databases have an interface that looks like this:
From this front page, enter your basic search in the top search box (circled in green). You can filter for scholarly articles by selecting the "peer-reviewed journals" checkbox. You can also filter from the results page:
You can check the "peer reviewed journals" box in the menu on the right-hand side of the screen, or you can choose "academic journals" from the source types displayed above the results. Both options are circled in green on this illustration.
Other Databases
Most databases that include schlolarly content have an option to filter for it. If the interface doesn't look like nay of the examples above, look for it in these places:
- The basic search page
- The advanced search page
- The results page
The following are some of the words and phrases that might be used to label the filter:
- Scholarly
- Academic
- Peer-reviewed
- Refereed
If you don't find it, you can contact a librarian for more help!