ENG 1000 Introduction to Academic Writing - Spring 2021

Scholarly and Peer-Reviewed Articles

• Scholarly articles go through the peer-review process and are typically published in journals.  Use library databases to find articles.

Books

• Use the Table of Contents at the front of the book to browse chapter content and the Index at the end to look up specific terms
• eBooks have an additional feature called "search within" that allows you to search the full text of the book

Websites 

• For unfamiliar websites, practice lateral reading.  Search the website or company name on Google to see what other websites and articles are saying about it, and determine if it is trustworthy.
• Limit your results by using the limiter site:.  Example below: This search will only return results for websites that end in .gov.

Lateral Reading

Some of the most credible websites are .com (New York Times, Wall Street Journal), while biased and partisan groups may have websites ending in .org. Don't only rely on the website domain (.com, .gov, .edu, or .org) to determine the credibility of the website.  Lateral reading is a method used by professional fact-checkers to determine a source's credibility.

Steps for Lateral Reading:

• Open new tabs and search for information about the website you're reading from Wikipedia or credible news sources.
• Look for information about the mission, funding, and potential biases.
• Go beyond the news story and look for the original resource or other scholarly information using Library resources.

Is it scholarly?

An article is typically considered scholarly if it has the following items:

• Author names and credentials
  • The author(s) list their degrees and university or research affiliations.
• Abstract
  • Summarizes the articles content.
• Methods
  • Can also appear as Methodology, Research Methods, etc. This section describes the methods used by the authors to collect data.
• Findings
  • Can also appear as Data Analysis, Analysis, Results, etc. This section analyzes the collected data.
• Conclusion
  • A summary of the findings. 
• Reference List