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What are Scholarly Sources?

Contents

• What are Scholarly Sources?

• Primary Sources

• Secondary Sources

• Evaluating Sources

• Adequate Sources

• Reliable Sources

• Scholarly Sources

• Peer-Reviewed Sources

• Relevant Sources

 

What are Scholarly Sources?

An essay is only as good as the sources you use for your research. Your History essays must be based on trustworthy, academic primary and secondary sources. This module will help you to choose reliable sources, to avoid unscholarly sources, and to evaluate the relevance of the sources for your research.

 

Primary Sources

Most good history writing relies on a combination of primary and secondary sources. While you will not usually be required to use primary sources in your first year essays (although you are encouraged to use them if you wish), they are frequently required in upper year History courses. Primary sources are original, first-hand materials such as:

• government documents, public records, statistics

• letters, diaries, manuscripts

• interviews, eye-witness accounts

• political cartoons, newspaper announcements and articles

• photographs, artwork

• maps, charts

• meeting minutes

• songs, or original works of literature

Primary sources provide the raw evidence for your argument. In general, a primary source is information, an artefact, creative work, or document without any accompanying interpretation. The exceptions to this rule are first-hand accounts, newspaper and/or journal articles, chronicles, histories, and other texts that are written within the same period as the event you are researching. For example, articles written about lynching and segregation while lynching and segregation were still active in the American south are considered primary sources, even though they probably contain some analysis of the events described. Analytical accounts written within the same period as the events they describe are usually considered primary sources since their authors are responding to immediate events and are immersed in the period in which the event takes place.

 

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are books or articles that analyze and interpret historical events. The authors of secondary sources use a combination of primary sources and other secondary sources to build an argument about the particular event they are examining. The author of a secondary text is generally not responding to an immediate event or problem. Rather, the author is looking at the event from some distance. Examples of secondary works include:

• journal articles or chapters in scholarly books

• monographs (i.e. book-length works on a scholarly subject)

• textbooks (not usually considered a reliable scholarly source)

• encyclopedias (not usually considered a reliable scholarly source)

• websites (not usually considered a reliable scholarly source)

Secondary sources can provide you with general knowledge and specific details about your subject, but more importantly, they can suggest different ways to interpret your subject. Often the authors of secondary sources will disagree on how to interpret a historical event. You must read these sources critically. In your essay, you can use secondary sources either to offer a contrary point of view that you want to challenge or to back up your own argument. When you use secondary sources in an essay, you are, in a sense, entering into a dialogue with other authors and commenting on primary material indirectly. 

Evaluating Sources

Before you dive into your research, it is important to do a preliminary evaluation of the sources available to make sure of the following:

• There are adequate sources.

• The sources are reliable.

• The sources are relevant.  

Adequate Sources

Most teachers assigning a History essay will specify a minimum number of sources that you are expected to cite in your essay. This usually means that you will need to consult more books or articles than this in order to find the most appropriate, useful, and scholarly sources. Thus, it is essential that you make sure that sufficient relevant and reliable sources are available. In our day-to-day life, we are used to being able to track down most of the information we are looking for quickly and easily on the Internet. When we are researching for an academic essay, however, the best information and sources may be more difficult to find. Internet sources are normally not considered reliable, unless they are previously published scholarly sources or scholarly books. You will usually need to go to a school or municipal library or an archive to find sources for History essays. The library staff is always ready to help in this respect.

 

Reliable Sources

Topics that are popular or controversial may have a great deal written about them, but how much of it is reliable? In an academic essay, it is important that the sources you use are accurate, thorough, balanced, and verifiable. While you can and should use the skills outlined in the Critical Reading module to evaluate your sources, these skills are not enough to determine whether a source can be considered reliable. If you are using a source to back up your argument in an scholarly essay, it is important that the source be considered reliable not only by you, but also by other academics in general. When choosing your sources look for works that are:

• scholarly, and/or

• peer-reviewed.

Some types of sources are not considered reliable:

• textbooks because they tend to be superficial and because the authors are rarely experts on the broad subject areas they cover.

• encyclopedias because they are usually brief, lack footnotes to sources, and may or may not be written by an expert.

• websites will usually not be accepted by your professors as scholarly sources because they tend to be brief, superficial, and lack scholarly apparatus. It is usually hard to judge what the scholarly qualifications of the author are. It is fine to use scholarly articles and primary sources that have been posted on the web after publication in print form.

It is fine to use these kind of sources as a starting place, but they shouldn't be final sources for your essays.

NB: Some of the sources you use, whether primary or secondary, will clearly be biased or incomplete. For example, a slave-owner's account of slavery in the American South might well be biased towards slave-owners. His account may use facts or figures - the life expectancy of slaves, for example - to back up the argument. When using these sources, it is important to acknowledge their biases and to be wary of the facts and figures provided, but you may wish to use a source that exaggerates or misrepresents some aspect of a topic in order to illustrate past attitudes and opinions. (Do an OPVL) 

Scholarly Sources

How can you tell if a source is "scholarly"?

• Purpose: Scholarly or academic sources may have a political agenda, but their primary purpose is research, analysis and the pursuit of knowledge. The purpose of non-scholarly sources may be to entertain or to persuade an audience of a particular point of view, not to present a full and balanced analysis of a topic.

• Scope: Scholarly work usually takes a focused and in-depth look at a topic. Non-scholarly sources, on the other hand, tend to give broad or general overviews of a topic or even if focused, tend not to treat the topic thoroughly or in any depth. Non-scholarly sources may leave out relevant information that does not support the argument presented. A good scholarly source, on the other hand, should acknowledge important facts that don't support its argument and account for them.

• Author and Audience: Scholarly sources are written by academics, historians, researchers and experts and are aimed at other academics, historians, researchers and students. Non-scholarly works tend to be written by people outside this group and aimed at the general public. A good deal of the information readily available on the Internet is aimed at the general public and is not considered scholarly. Most scholarly sources are not readily available on the Internet since their intended audience is academic. These sources are often found either in print, or through subscription-based web access such as that available through the Trent University library web site.

• Documentation: Scholarly works cite their sources so that information can be verified. Non-scholarly sources may present facts and figures without saying where they come from. These sources cannot be verified. Avoid secondary sources that do not include copious footnotes or endnotes.

• Publisher: Most scholarly books are published by academic publishers, usually university presses. While not every academic publisher has the word "University" in their title (St. Martin's, Routledge, Boydell and Brewer, and Blackwell's are some famous exceptions), most do.

Scholarly sources include academic journals, scholarly monographs, and collections of articles. 

Peer-Reviewed Sources

Most of the journals available to you through the university library (both in print and online) are peer-reviewed or refereed. This means that the articles in them have been reviewed by experts in the field before being published. Unlike web-pages, or non-academic articles, these articles have passed though a review process and have essentially been given a "stamp of approval" from other historians. You must still read them critically since there is no topic that historians agree on unanimously, but when these articles are used in an essay, they will hold more weight than an article or web-page that has not been peer reviewed or refereed.

There are several ways to determine whether a journal is peer-reviewed. Often academic search engines will allow you to select "academic journals"  as a search option. You can also read the editorial page and/or submission guidelines to find out whether the journal is peer-reviewed.

Scholarly monographs, or book-length works, also are usually reviewed by the author's peers, both before and after publication. Looking up reviews of your source in reputable academic journals can give you an idea of how the work was received by other academics and experts in the field. Be sure, however, to look up more than one review for any given source since one reviewer may have a drastically different opinion than another.

 (from TRENT UNIVERSITY)

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