While peer-reviewed and scholarly sources are usually reliable, you still need to evaluate them. If you learn to assess the credibility and usefulness of your scholarly sources, you can effectively integrate them into your research and writing.
For your English Education course, you are asked to find recent scholarly articles on a topic related to teaching poetry to students. You choose to write your paper about using various languages to teach poetry to high school students.
Use the evaluation criteria to evaluate the source below to determine if the source is relevant and credible for your assignment and topic.
WHO: This record doesn't tell us much about the authors. So, we did some more investigating and googled the author to learn more about her credentials (yes, it's okay to google them). We learn that the author has experience in English education. She likely has had education and training on this topic.
WHAT: This is a peer-reviewed article from a journal, which fits our assignment requirement. The keywords match our research topic, and when we skimmed through the article, the author based her information on fact, not opinion. The author also cites where she is getting their information so we can go verify the info ourselves.
WHERE: The article was published in a scholarly journal relating to language, identity, and education. We did a Google search on the journal and found no apparent bias.
WHY: After reading the abstract and skimming the article, we decided this article is relevant to us. We can use it to demonstrate how allowing students to use several languages when writing poetry makes poetry more accessible to students.
Scenario: Alex is asked to write a paper on the effects of exercise on the mental health of college students. The assignment requires students to use academic sources that are credible and relevant.
Which article might be the best option for Alex to use for his research?
An anecdotal blog post on how running reduces anxiety that was written by a health influencer.
This article is not an academic, peer-reviewed source and therefore does not match the assignment requirements.
An article from the Journal of Mental Health written by psychologists from the University of Illinois on the effects of caffeine on undergraduate students' mental health.
This article meets the requirements of being peer-reviewed, is from authors with credentials and is recent but it is not relevant to Alex's topic.
An article on the benefit of yoga on female undergraduate students' stress that was published by kinesiologists at Yale University and published in the Journal of Kinesiology and Sports Science.
This article is relevant to Alex's topic and the assignment requirements.