When you are writing an academic paper, you should use scholarly sources. One way of doing that is to use peer-reviewed journal articles, which are scholarly texts that have been reviewed by subject experts. See the following video: Peer review in 3 minutes.
You can limit your search to articles from scholarly peer-reviewed journals in some databases. However, if you do that, other types of scholarly publications are excluded, such as academic books and dissertations.
It is good to always check that articles, books and chapters from edited books are scholarly. Here are some things that characterize scholarly sources:
The author should be affiliated with a university. If it is a journal article, author affiliation is often stated on the first or last page of the article. If it is a book, it may be stated on a page at the beginning of the book or at the back of the book. If you cannot find any information in the publication about author affiliation or if you do not yet have access to the text, you can try finding information about the author by googling on the author's name in combination with for example (university OR college OR professor).
There should be a reference list, endnotes or footnotes with a substantial number of references that the author refers to in the publication. The references should primarily be scholarly sources. It can therefore be useful to look through the references to see what type of sources the author seems to use.
The language should be formal, i.e. not informal/colloquial.
The following things are also typical of scholarly journal articles:
Scholarly articles are usually quite long compared to articles from popular magazines or newspapers.
The following parts may occur: abstract (i.e. a brief summary of the article), introduction, method, results, discussion and/or conclusion. However, not all scholarly articles include these parts. For example, these parts are often not included in literary research articles.
In addition, academic books are characterized by the following things:
Publishers that publish academic books. For example university publishers, such as Cambridge University Press, Harvard University Press and Sorbonne Université Presses. There are many other publishers that publish academic books, such as Routledge, Bloomsbury Academic and L'Harmattan. Check if it says on the publisher's website that they publish academic books.
Sometimes chapters are written by different authors and one or more editors are listed on the book cover. The editor has the important job of checking the quality of the texts before they are published. However, not all academic books have chapters by different authors and editors listed on the book cover.
Even if it can help to find high-quality literature by using scholarly publications, you should critically evaluate all sources. Authors can for example be biased and exclude information that does not support their views. Consequently, tryif possible to check what other authors have to say about the same subject.
Unfortunately there are many articles on the web from so called predatory journals, which are low-quality and dishonest publications. Predatory journals make money by deceiving researchers into believing that they are legitimate scholarly journals and charging authors a publication fee without checking articles for quality. They also usually falsely claim that they are peer-reviewed journals and sometimes the editorial board consists of people who do not exist or who are unaware that they are listed as members of the board.
If you are using the databases MLA International Bibliography, Linguistics Collection, JStor and Web of Science, there is little risk of finding articles from predatory journals, whereas if you search in e.g. Google Scholar, there is a great risk. It can therefore be wise not to search in Google Scholar. However, it is okay to use Google Scholar to try to obtain specific articles in full text that you have found information about in the databases mentioned above.
If you despite the risk choose to search in Google Scholar or any other databases than those mentioned above, you should always check that articles are not from predatory journals. One way of doing that is to check if the journal is listed in Cabells Predatory Reports. If the journal is listed in Cabells Predatory Reports, it is advisable not to use articles from that journal. Even if Cabells Predatory Reports is continuouly updated, there may be some predatory journals that have not yet been identified and included in Cabells Predatory Reports. It can therefore be good to use other methods and resources to check that it is not a predatory journal. For example, you can check if the journal is indexed in Journal Citation Reports. If the journal is indexed in Journal Citation Reports, it should not be a predatory journal. You can also check the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers. If a journal has been approved in the Norwegian Register (i.e. if the journal has been classified at level 1 or 2), it should not be a predatory journal. If it is an open access journal, you can also check if the journal is indexed in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). If the journal is indexed in DOAJ, it should not be a predatory journal.