Literature searching: How to find and use databases: 5. Evaluating sources

• Who wrote it? What expertise, authority, qualifications or experience does the author have? What else have they written? Is the publisher an academic publisher or a recognised institution? Is an article published in a peer-reviewed journal?
• When was the work published? Are there more recent versions or editions? Has research moved on since publication?
• Where was the work published? Where was it written? Which geographical areas or jurisdictions is it applicable to?
• Why was it written? Is there any bias apparent? Does the author or publisher have a vested interest in the research? Is any bias declared? (That there is bias in a document is not necessarily a reason to dismiss it – but it is something to take into consideration in evaluating the work.)
• What is the content of the source? Is it relevant to your research topic? Is it accurate and well-researched? Does it contain appropriate references and is the methodology clear and reliable?

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Articles in peer-reviewed journals are subject to a process of academic evaluation designed to maintain standards of quality in research. Database services often provide an option to limit results to peer-reviewed journals.

Peer-reviewed articles are generally regarded as being of higher academic quality than non-peer-reviewed articles.

When making evaluative judgments, abstracting and indexing databases can help you by providing supplementary information about a document. This means that you can often make an initial judgment about the value of the source before taking the step of accessing and reading the full-text.

An abstract record may provide not only a brief summary of the document, but also information about:

• the author's affiliation (any institution or organisation the author is associated with)
• the date of publication
• the location (either where the document was published or the geographical focus of the text)
• the main subjects and keywords associated with the document
• whether published in a scholarly or peer-reviewed publication

In addition, abstract records may provide citation information:

• how many publications the document you have found cites

and, importantly:

• how many times the document you have found has been cited.

Many subject-specific databases provide abstract records and citation information.

However, key multi-disciplinary abstracting and indexing databases providing citation information include: