HED 207: Youth Health Issues, Pettit

For your assignment, you have been asked to find peer-reviewed journal articles. How do we differentiate these from other types of information?

You may have encountered an assignment like this already in your time at UWL, or maybe a professor has asked that you find "scholarly" sources (also called academic sources) for a research assignment. Often, we create a duality, sorting sources into broad categories - either scholarly or popular - we do this to make it easier to get the conversation started. Of course, there are more than two types of information out there.

Popular sources are information intended for a general audience or for the public. Popular sources can be anything from a social media post to a news article; it's a broad category. Some distinguishing traits of popular sources:

• Written to inform, entertain, or persuade
• Short-to-medium length, with language that is understandable to a wide audience
• Often contain colorful photographs, illustrations, charts, or advertisements
• Rarely list their sources formally, may have interviews or contextual links
• Written by staff writers or freelance contributors
• Often produced in a short timeline to cover current events

Scholarly sources, in contrast, have distinguishing traits such as:

• Written by experts in a field for other experts, scholars, or scholars-in-training (authors' names are usually listed with their credentials, like institutional affiliations and/or degrees)
• Contribute new knowledge (empirical research article) or summarize what is known (review article) - more types of scholarly sources
• Use formal language and only contain figures, tables, charts, or graphs that convey information
• Usually divided into sections and include headings such as abstract, introduction/literature review, methodology, results, and discussion/conclusion
• Have in-text citations and a formal list of references
• Often produced over a longer period of time, as research and review are conducted

It's important to remember the distinction between scholarly and peer-reviewed: peer review is a formal process in which works are evaluated by fellow experts in a field prior to publication. Not all scholarly sources have gone through the peer review process!

Again, you have been asked to find a peer-reviewed journal article. To be sure you've found a source that fits your needs, ask yourself:

Is it a journal article?

Look for both an article and a journal title. Look for volume and issue numbers. Look for an abstract (this is a summary; most scholarly articles are long, usually 6+ pages). Look for a DOI (digital object identifier).

Is it peer-reviewed?

Look for a publication history or revision dates on the first page of the article (the dates indicate when the article went through the peer review process). Look for the name of the journal and search up the journal's homepage, then look for a description of the journal, or for a section with a "peer review policy" or information for authors.

Special thanks to University of Oklahoma Libraries and UW-Green Bay Libraries for their help in creating this guide!

Infographic created by UW-Green Bay Libraries and is icensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.