Sources for Academic Research

James R. Adair, Department of Philosophy & Classics, UTSA

When writing an academic paper, whether a research paper or a short bio or topical study, all sources cited must be scholarly in nature. Here are some guidelines for finding appropriate scholarly resources or judging whether sources located are in fact academic in nature.

• Printed sources
  • Printed books written by scholars with recognized academic credentials (usually graduate degrees from accredited institutions of higher education) in the subject area covered are legitimate academic sources.
  • Journal articles appearing in scholarly, peer-reviewed academic journals are legitimate academic sources.
  • Dictionary or encyclopedia articles appearing in print and published by academic or major commercial publishers (e.g., Encyclopedia Britannica) are generally valid academic sources. However, encyclopedia articles are usually not sufficient in themselves to provide the totality of information needed for an academic paper; rather, they should serve as supplements to books or journal articles.
  • In many papers, primary sources may be used, usually alongside scholarly secondary sources. Examples of primary sources include the texts (usually translated) of ancient authors, demographic data generated by government sources (e.g., census data), autobiographies, and individual poems and novels by the subject of the study.
• Electronic sources that originally appeared in print
  • Electronic copies of originally printed scholarly works have the same value as the original print versions, whether they are books, journal articles, or primary sources. Digitized books may be found in electronic libraries or as individual books. Digitized articles may be found in electronic versions of a particular journal (e.g., Science or Revista iberoamericana) or in large online journal collections such as Academic Search Complete (published by EBSCO), JSTOR, or Project Muse. Digitized primary sources may be found in large collections (e.g., Project Gutenberg) or on university websites (e.g., the Perseus Digital Library, sponsored by Tufts University).
• Sources that were “born digital”
  • Many scholarly, peer-reviewed academic journals are found only online, and articles in such journals carry the same weight as articles found in print journals. Such journals may be identified by their association with a university or academic society (e.g., TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, sponsored by the Society of Biblical Literature) and/or an editorial board that contains credentialed scholars (e.g., Electronic Journal of Theoretical Physics).
  • Several scholarly online encyclopedias exist, and their articles may be used in an academic paper. They may be identified by the academic credentials of their editors and authors and/or by their association with a university or academic society (e.g., the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, hosted by the University of Tennessee at Martin).
  • At present few scholarly books appear exclusively in online format, but as they become increasingly common, the same criteria used to identify scholarly printed books may be used to identify scholarly electronic books (e.g., recognized academic credentials).
  • Crowdsourced online resources like Wikipedia often contain a great deal of valuable information, but because of lack of direct academic control of the content of individual pages, such resources may not be used in academic papers. However, these resources are often useful starting points for research, and they often refer to other resources, both print and digital, that may be valid scholarly resources. (It is interesting to note that the Oxford English Dictionary originally began as a crowdsourced work, long before the term crowdsourcing was coined.)
  • Legitimate information may often be gleaned from other online resources, particularly those associated with university (URL ending in .edu in the U.S., or ending in .ac.uk in the U.K, etc.) or military/government (URL ending in .mil or .gov in the U.S., different top-level domains in other countries) websites, but only if the content of the web pages in question is created by scholars (i.e., not by undergraduate students collaborating on projects, etc.). Nonprofit organizations (URL ending in .org) may be sources of legitimate scholarly material (e.g., the NDT Resource Center, sponsored by several universities and other academic organizations), though many are not. Commercial websites (URL ending in .com, .net, .co.uk, etc.) are generally not sources of valid scholarly information, though exceptions exist.
• Getting started
  • A good place to start searching for scholarly sources is the online catalog of a university library. Another good starting point is to access a large online journal collection, such as Academic Search Complete by EBSCO, then do electronic searches of the material. Generalized web searches, such as using Google, usually return a higher percentage of hits that are not scholarly in nature than the first two approaches, but useful information may be returned as well.
  • Once a single source on a topic has been found (often including non-scholarly sources like Wikipedia), the user can follow the “bibliographic trace” method, identifying a valid scholarly resource in a footnote or bibliographic entry, then examining that source for information and additional scholarly resources in its own footnotes and bibliographic entries, then examining those new sources for information and further footnotes/bibliographic entries, and so on.
• Date of sources
  • Except for primary sources (see below), books and articles more than about fifty years old should be used with caution, particularly when dealing with science or technology or when significant recent discoveries or theoretical developments in the field mandate the use of newer sources (e.g., archaeological discoveries). In particular, more recent encyclopedia articles should be preferred over much older articles on the same subject, in most cases.
  • In the case of primary sources, more recent critical editions of works should be used in preference to older editions. In those cases where no more recent critical edition exists, the older edition may be used (e.g., the nineteenth-century Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina).