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Instructors may often ask you to find "credible" or "quality" sources for your research projects. "Credible" and "quality" are very subjective terms but generally your instructor is asking that you spend some time evaluating your sources rather than grabbing the first thing you see when using your favorite search engine. Newspaper articles can be credible or quality sources as can books, but much of the time instructors are asking that you locate scholarly articles. More specifically, scholarly articles that go through peer-review (evaluation of the research and writing by other experts) before being published are said to be credible or of high quality.
You can find credible or quality sources using 1Search. Use the modules on this page to learn more about evaluating your sources, to learn what peer-review is, and to learn how to find peer-reviewed articles in 1Search.
Not everything you find will be of high quality or appropriate to your topic. You need to carefully evaluate your sources before incorporating them into your research. Ask yourself some questions:
Peer reviewed articles are research articles that have been evaluated and approved by other experts in the field before being accepted for publication in a journal. To identify peer reviewed and scholarly articles, consider these elements:
NOTE: In many databases, such as EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest it is possible to limit to Peer Reviewed/Scholarly. See illustrations for this at: University of California - Riverside
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