How to Recognize Scholarly Journals/Articles for Communications Research

Is this article appropriate for research or is it from a general/popular magazine?

Articles published in reliable scholarly, peer-reviewed journals, or trade magazines provide the best material for research. Those in general or popular magazines often do not. Let's take a look...

• Already know where to find scholarly and trade journals?
  Browse to Subject List : Communications and Media Studies to access databases that include peer-reviewed publications.
• Feeling some confusion?
  Walk through a basic checklist to determine if an article is scholarly and peer-reviewed.

While scholarly information is accessible on the Web, ensuring that what you find online is actually scholarly can be challenging. Because information on the Web does not require any editorial oversight, one of the few ways to insure reputability is an article's context — who has published it? Is it peer-reviewed? Even if writing appears scholarly, this doesn't necessarily mean that it is. Take a look at our checklist to help you make this determination.

Online news articles, RSS feeds, news sites, op-eds, hypertexts... endless resources of all kinds in every medium bombard us as we cruise the information highway. This makes it difficult to know if what we're finding qualifies as appropriate scholarly research or not.

A great way to save time and avoid confusion is to begin your research with sources that have already been recognized as reliable and reputable. You can find these sources in professional trade magazines and peer-reviewed, scholarly journals. Where might you find these journals? One option is to search those databases specific to Communications, such as those in the Subject List : Communications and Media Studies. These databases access pre-selected trade magazines and scholarly, peer-reviewed journals that are well received in their field; this means that their contents are of a higher quality and are considered reputable by experts in the field.