Guide to Information Seeking: Evaluating information

In information retrieval, it is important to be able to distinguish between scholarly, professional, and general/popular publications, so that their suitability can be evaluated, for example, as source material for a report, essay, or thesis.

General/Popular publications are, for example, magazines and newspapers. In these types of publications, the target audience is the general public. In magazines and newspapers, the writer is often a journalist instead of an expert, who either has or does not have expertise on the topic. Examples of general publications: Time magazine, The Guardian, Wired, National Geographic.

Trade journals are journals published by trade associations or universities of applied sciences, whose target audience are professionals in the field. The writer of trade publications is often a professional in the field, or sometimes a journalist who knows the field. The topics deal with current news and practical information from the field. Examples of trade journals: Nursing Outlook, The Journal of Marketing, The Journal of Engineering Education, and journals published by universities of applied sciences.

Scholarly journals are scholarly journals/periodicals (sometimes also called journals, peer reviewed journals, scientific journals), whose target audience is considerably smaller than the previous ones; mainly researchers, experts, and students in the field. The articles are based on research and the results gained from it, which can be very detailed/thorough. They can be identified, for example, by the following things:

• The article is often peer reviewed, where one or more experts in the field evaluate the scientific quality and content of the article and modify it based on their comments before publication.
• The article structure usually follows the formal IMRD structure. Following sections can be found in the article: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion or analysis of the results.
• The author(s) is a researcher/expert and their background organisation is a well-known research institute or university/college.
• The article uses sources extensively that are clearly marked as citations in-text and reference list / bibliography.

More information: https://libguides.tuni.fi/information-searching-guide/evaluation

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. 

An individual article may not provide information whether the article is peer reviewed or not. Information on peer review can be found on the home page of the journal. For example, the About the journal section on the Applied Nursing Research home page states that the journal is peer reviewed: "Applied Nursing Research presents original, peer-reviewed research findings...".

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.

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