Social Science 101 - Imhof: Types of Scholarly Sources

You assignment requires you to find scholarly sources representing your specific disciplinary lens. For this assignment scholarly sources include:

• peer reviewed academic journal articles (including research articles and review articles)
• conference papers
• scholarly books or book chapters

Most articles found in social science journals are peer reviewed research or review articles, but journals may also opinion pieces, book reviews, and/or letters to the editor, which are not scholarly sources.

Scientific articles that present the results of original research will include the following sections (though they may be labeled slightly differently):

• Abstract
• Introduction / Literature Review
• Methods
• Results
• Discussion / Conclusion 
• References

Review articles may give you a broader view of your topic, because they review many previous research studies rather than reporting the results of one particular study.

Conference papers are written documents in which scholars present their research and/or ideas to their peers at academic conferences. After presenting it at a conference, the author(s) may revise and/or expand the conference paper and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal for publication.

Scholarly books include entire books written by a single scholar and anthologies for which different chapters are written by different scholars. Look for these features to determine whether or not a book is a scholarly source:

• The author(s) and/or editor(s) are scholars with expertise in the topics covered in the book
• Authors site their sources
• The book might be published by a university press

The following video was created for COMM classes to demonstrate how to look for the features of research articles. Though it uses articles from the database Communication and Mass Media Complete, it can help students from any class identify research articles in library databases.