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Critical Evaluation of Resources

Scholarly or Popular?

  • Scholarly articles are often the best sources for university-level research.
  • Scholarly articles (published in scholarly journals) are reviewed by experts before they are published.
  • Popular articles (published in newspapers, magazines, and other sources) are not reviewed by experts, but may be extensively researched and / or fact-checked, depending on the publication.

What to Look for in a Scholarly Article

Image with text that reads "Is the article scholarly?" and includes the following criteria: written by experts for experts; 10-12+ pages long; uses scholarly or technical language; includes an abstract; graphs and tables; long list of references at the end

Peer Review in Five Minutes (video tutorial)

From North Carolina State University Libraries

Ulrichs Global Serials Directory

Not sure if an article is scholarly or popular?  Ulrichs has detailed information on more than 300,000 publications.  Enter journal/magazine title in the search box and find your publication.  Then, look for Academic/Scholarly in the Content Type field.