Guide to Information Seeking: Evaluating information

It is important to distinguish between a scholarly and a popular publication, especially when you are writing e.g. a report, an essay or a thesis, and must evaluate whether your sources are suitable.

Popular publications are, for example, magazines, newspapers and trade journals. They are intended for the public, or professionals. Magazine and newspaper articles are mainly written by journalists, instead of experts of a particular field.

Scholarly articles (in a journal, peer-reviewed journal, scholarly journal) are based on scientific research. A scholarly article has distinctive features:

• the quality of a scholarly article is guaranteed by peer-review
• a scholarly article follows the IMRD format. Following parts can be found in the article: Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion.
• scholarly articles are written by experts in the field and academics from well-known organizations, research organizations and educational institutions, such as universities
• a scholarly article includes in-text references, citations, and a bibliography

A peer review or a referee process is an essential part of academic publishing. Before an article is published in a peer reviewed journal, it has been read and reviewed by experts in the relevant field. For example, phrasing of a question, research methods used and interpretation of the results are assessed in the peer review process. It also ensures that the text structure meets the requirements of scholarly writing. Reviewers recommend whether the article is ready to be published or not, and reviewers may suggest improvements to the text before the article can be published.

Peer review is thought to guarantee the quality of an article. You can refine your search in many databases so that the search result includes only peer reviewed articles. The used terms are e.g. scholarly, peer reviewed, research article, review article. 

When using article search in Finna, narrow the search by clicking the box Peer reviewed:

Primary sources or original sources provide new information and give direct evidence on a topic. Primary sources include for example research articles and dissertations, where authors report their own research and its findings.

Secondary sources or second-hand sources discuss primary sources. Secondary sources comment on a research, evaluate, summarize or compare them, or draw conclusions from them. Secondary sources include for example news articles on a research, literature reviews, meta-analyses and textbooks.

Use primary sources whenever possible. Secondary sources include analysis and interpretation, and the contents of the primary source may become distorted. This does mean secondary sources are automatically unusable, but you should consider their usability along with other criteria. You may use for example a literature review published in a scholarly journal, where they draw together a number of research findings to summarize current knowledge on a topic. You can also use an article where the author summarizes the findings in his or hers dissertation. In contrast, you cannot use a newspaper article on a new research finding, but should seek out the original research.

See video about the difference between primary and secondary sources and ways to tell them apart:

Video: Rasmussen College Library & Learning Services