• If it has a Digital Object Identifer (DOI), which looks similar to a URL, either near the title or at the end 

• If it has an "abstract" or summary of the study at the beginning

• If the author's credentials are included

• If it uses technical and formal language and is longer than a typical article

• If it is structured with sections with titles like "literature review," "methods," "results," "discussion"

• If it has an extensive bibliography of sources at the end

• Start with suggestions on the Finding Sources page to locate articles with Google Scholar or the Gale databases or a customized AI search engine. 

• If you can't access an article because it's behind a paywall and not available in our databases, you may request an Interlibrary Loan from Ms. Marie. However, this process takes 3-4 weeks, so this might be worthwhile only if the paper is foundational or an anchor paper on your topic. 

• Scholarly work that is free on the web is called "Open Access" or "OA" (as opposed to articles that are behind a paywall on a journal site). Most OA articles are legit. However, according to two professors at the University of Washington, an estimated 5 to 10% of scholarly papers on the web are published by “predatory publishers.” These publishers pose as academic journals but actually make money by charging their researchers a fee to get published and have little or no peer review.
  (West, Jevin D., and Carl T. Bergstrom. “Misinformation in and about Science.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 118, no. 15, Apr. 2021. www.pnas.org, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912444117.)

• To be sure an Open Access (OA) scholarly article is from a legitimate source, see if the publisher is listed in the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals).

• Some articles that show up on Google Scholar and elsewhere on the web are called "gray literature." Gray literature is produced by organizations like government agencies, academia, businesses, and non-profits outside of traditional publishing channels. Examples include reports, conference papers, white papers, theses, and government documents, which can be more current than scholarly articles but may vary in quality because they are often not peer-reviewed. 

But don't despair! Any scholarly article found in our JSTOR or Gale databases or from a journal listed on the DOAJ IS credible.

Scholarly articles are written in formal and technical language because they are meant to be read by other experts, so they are hard to read! They are also longer than articles written for a popular audience and are carefully structured.  The great news is that you don't have to read an entire scholarly article from start to finish to use it. In fact, you should skip around, use the headings, and skim parts. See the video below for some suggestions. 

• This interactive site helps you dissect the Anatomy of a Scholarly Article (example is from the natural sciences)

• Try uploading a pdf of the article into an AI chatbot and asking it questions about the article. For example, ask for a summary of the abstract in language a 10th grader can understand. Ask it to find the 10 hardest words to understand and translate them into your mother tongue. Ask how the research was conducted.

It depends on the discipline. 

Many types of research follow the IMRaD structure, shown below. In this model, the literature review is contained in the introduction. The results section contains lots of charts and data. And the discussion section contains limitations and ideas for future research.