SWK 3140 - Social Work with Groups

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

Scholarly or academic articles are peer-reviewed.

Peer-reviewed articles have gone through a rigorous screening and editing process that confirms the research meets certain standards.

You can find peer-reviewed articles in library databases in a number of ways, depending on the place you are searching. Look for the option to check a box before or after searching to filter to only peer-reviewed sources. 

When you are looking at an article in Spartan Search, the library's system to search across all databases, you will see a badge identifying the article if it is from a peer-reviewed journal. In other search results you can check if an article is peer reviewed by looking in the article's details or clicking on the journal title to learn more.

If you aren't sure whether an article is peer reviewed, you can:

• look up the journal information
• find it in Spartan Search
• ask a librarian

Note: Not every article published in a peer-reviewed journal will be a scholarly article. It could be a review of a book, an informational article, or something else entirely. Learn more about how to identify a scholarly article.