Master ISS literature search: Selecting and evaluating sources

On this page:

Selecting sources

Peer review

How to recognize a peer reviewed article

How to determine the relevancy of sources

How to determine the scholarly nature of sources

Crapmap (checklist)

Other pages:

Introduction

Phrasing the search question

Search engines

Search strategy and techniques

Getting hold of the full text

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Referring in APA style

Thesis

Summary and feedback

You can go from one page to the other by clicking on the tabs in the black top bar (for example, go to the tab Search engines) or use the next/previous buttons at the bottom of the page.

Read the pages from top to bottom.

You can navigate to specific topics or pages by clicking the links in the Index.

How do you determine whether an item is suitable for you to use?

• Start with the abstract and possibly the keywords present in the article. From this you can often deduce whether the article is relevant to you or not. Try to answer the following questions: what are the important concepts and/or theories of the article and do they relate to your research question/topic? Does the article only tangentially touch on your topic or is it really the core? And does it have a similar context (e.g. target group, country)?
• If you are unable to find an abstract, or if it is not available, open the full text. Is the article in a language that is unreadable for you, or is the full text not available? Then this source is immediately eliminated. If you can read the article, start with the introduction and look at the headings and first sentences of the paragraphs, look for tables or graphics and see what they are about and read the conclusions. Based on this you can quickly get a good impression of the content of an article.
• Do you recognize the following elements in the article: a problem or question, (scientific) method used, findings or results, discussion, most important conclusions/arguments and references to scientific literature (in the bibliography or notes)?
• Also look outside the article. Has it appeared in a scientific peer-reviewed journal? Or is it from a scientific book/ edited volume? Take a look at where the authors work. Is the author a journalist or a scientist and affiliated with a scientific institution? What else has the author published?
• By scanning/skimming an article and it's context in this way you can quickly get an impression of the usefulness of the article.

Would you like to know more about relevance and scientific reliability? Then take a look at the boxes below and our LibGuide on evaluating sources.

Note: not all your sources always have to be academic, sometimes you can also use reports or documents from government institutions.

Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competences as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication.

source: Wikipedia 

See also this video below:

Library NCSU. This video is published under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA US license

You often cannot see in the article itself whether an article has been peer-reviewed or not. But how do you find out?
You can use the tips below:

• If you are lucky, the article will say: 'published in a peer reviewed section of the journal' or something similar. In that case you will know soon enough.
• You can check whether the journal has a peer review procedure. This is often stated on the homepage of the journal itself, sometimes under the heading 'instructions for authors' or 'instructions for reviewers'. For a quick check, you can also search Google for the title of the journal in combination with words such as 'peer reviewed' or 'refereed', but if you don't find anything this way, it does not mean that the journal does not use peer review.
• An article can be published in a peer-reviewed journal, but not by itself be peer-reviewed. Consider, for example, book reviews, case descriptions or editorials. If you are unsure whether an article is suitable, also check whether the section/section of the journal in which the article was published is a peer-reviewed section (see the 'about section' of the journal).
• Some databases, such as Scopus, Web of Science and many subject-specific databases (for example PsycInfo or PubMed), apply a strict selection and only include peer-reviewed journals. Some databases also offer the option to filter on peer-reviewed articles. This also allows you to filter out (so not include) books or chapters from books, among other things.

In determining if a source is relevant, you may try to answer the following questions:

1. Does the source help you to answer your main questions and sub-questions?
2. Does the source answer your whole question/sub-question or only one aspect?
3. To what extent does the main question of the source you found match with your own questions?
4. How strong are the similarities between the research object or the analysis unit in the source you found and those in your own paper/thesis? The research object may be a period, or a person, a group, an area, a substance, a disease, a process etc.
5. Is the context of the research object the same as in your case?
6. When was the source published and when was the research that was written about executed?

Think that you will rarely find a source that provides a complete answer to your main questions and sub-questions and that gives a report of the exact same research or problem you are working on. 

Need to see the full text of an article? The next page is about how to get to the full text.

The crux of science lies in the extent to which an author/researcher performs his work objectively and makes it verifiable. In determining the quality and scientific nature of sources you may start from three kinds of checks:

1. Check by others, preceding publication
   • editors: editors of scientific journals are stricter than editors of non-scientific journals
   • publishers: some publishers only publish scientific books
   • peer review: some journals but also some book publishers ask experts for a (blind) judgement before publication
   • search engine/online bibliography: some search engines only include articles from high-quality, peer reviewed journals (for instance Scopus and Web of Science
   • financiers: some journals demand to know who funded the research
2. Check by others, after publication
   • reviews (in the case of books): are the reviews positive?
   • citations (mainly in the case of articles): is the piece cited often (taking into account how long it has been available) and more importantly:what is being said?
3. Check by yourself
   • are author and date of the text mentioned (particularly in the case of webpages)?
   • affiliation of the author: the author's job may tell you more about the scientific level, for instance if the author is employed by a good university
   • is the target group mentioned: (in particular in the case of websites and reports)
   • presence of explicit research questions and conclusions
   • presence of an explanation of the method used: how was the research conducted, where are the data coming from?
   • presence of enough and high-quality literature references or notes: what insights are used?
   • language level and well organised text

You can find more information in the Libguide Evaluating Sources