Evaluation Clues for Articles Found on the Web or in Library Databases
As more articles are published electronically as full text (complete article), clues from the publication itself are not available for the user to identify whether the article is from a scholarly journal or not. (When you do have the publication in hand, see How to Evaluate Journal Articles and Popular Magazines vs. Trade Magazines vs. Scholarly Journals.) This page has suggestions for ways to determine if an article is scholarly when you don't have the printed journal in front of you:
- A scholarly article will tend to have an extensive (more than ten entries) bibliography. Most genuinely scholarly sources will have a bibliography with thirty or more sources.
- The length of the article can be an indicator of type--longer articles (more than ten pages) will tend to be scholarly.
- Information about the journal that the article is from can be found in sources such as Magazines for Libraries, Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory, (online version called Ulrich's Periodical Directory) and for association publications, from the Encyclopedia of Associations (online version called Associations Unlimited). See Identifying Key Journals in a Field for additional information about using these reference sources. A scholarly article will most often be from an academic or scholarly publication.
(from online Ulrich's) - The index that is used to identify the article can be a clue for identifying scholarly journals. An index such as Biological Abstracts or Psychological Abstracts is only going to include scholarly journals. Web of Science, which combines Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, only contains citations to scholarly articles. Currently, few of the journals included in these sources have their articles available as full text, but time may change this. Many of the articles found in indexes such as ArticleFirst or Business Source Premier, are from either popular or trade magazines.
- Scholarly sources are sometimes separated in indexes: Business Source Premier and Academic Search Premier offer a check box on the initial search screen for "peer review." By checking the box, search results will only include citations to scholarly articles. Occasionally there are scholarly sources in general databases (such as LexisNexis Academic)--examine the other clues suggested on this page to determine if an individual article is scholarly and/or see How to Evaluate Journal Articles.
- Look for information about the author. A scholarly article will generally have an author who is affiliated with a university or other scholarly organization. However, scholars have been known to write articles for a general audience, so do not presume that because an author is an academic that her/his article is automatically scholarly.
- As a general rule, newspaper articles are not considered to be scholarly, although there are very rare exceptions to this rule.
- The reading level (noted in some databases) for non-scholarly articles will be lower or easier than scholarly ones. A reading level of up to 12 is probably going to be from a popular or trade source. A reading level of 12 or above is more likely, but not necessarily, to be from a research article. Newspaper articles (as mentioned above), are almost always (no matter what the length or the reading level) considered non-scholarly, although there are many instances when a researcher will want to use them.