Information Literacy Unit 5: Using Only the Best
Finding scholarly information
For certain activities within this course, you will be required to find scholarly information to support your arguments. Scholarly or ‘academic’ information is usually written by academics for an academic audience. This type of information is often found in journals which may be peer reviewed or refereed. The articles in such journals have been officially reviewed and selected for publishing by other academics in the field, and often contain original research.
Ulrichsweb database
A useful tool for determining if a particular journal is scholarly is the database, Ulrichsweb(online version of Ulrich’s Periodical Directory). This database provides a descriptive listing of journals and includes information about their scholarly status. Ulrichsweb can be located by going to the Library’s SearchSMART webpage at on the Library’s SearchSMART webpageat:
and then selecting the letter U in the database section (see below):
You will then be provided with a listing of the all the Library’s databases beginning with the letter U and from this listing you will then need to select Urichsweb on the presented page.
Using Ulrichsweb
A search in Ulrichsweb for information about the journal, Education Research and Perspectives, for example, reveals the following about its refereed status:
Setting limits
When searching for journal articles within databases, you will find that you can often choose to set limits to have only scholarly information retrieved. In Proquest, for example, you can choose to select:
In another database, Expanded Academic ASAP, you can choose to select:
It is important to remember that peer-reviewed publications are a particular standard of scholarly publication. Setting limits to scholarly publications will not always limit a search to peer-reviewed. As such, the best way to determine if a journal has been peer-reviewed is to search for the journal title in the Ulrichweb database.
If you have any doubt about whether or not the information you have selected is suitable in terms of its scholarly or academic standard, it is best to check with your lecturer.
Finding the full text of an article
Sometimes only the citation and abstract of a journal article are immediately available when you have conducted a database search. To help you find the full text of an article, the Library has purchased software called Article Linker. Read how Article Linker can help you at:
Evaluating resources
Once information has been found, it is very important that it is evaluated using recognised evaluation criteria. The following links provide help with evaluating sources of information in general, as well as evaluating websites:
Note: It is necessary to be familiar with the informationabove, including the information contained within thelinks, in order to complete Information Literacy Quiz 5. You will find the quiz listed when you select the Assessment link on theleft of the course website.