It's not hard to get on a computer and find material on any topic using Google. Finding articles in databases that meet your instructor's requirements takes more skill and evaluation, not to mention time.
Through the Cañada College Library, you have access to dozens of databases, each one containing hundreds of thousands of articles from journals, newspapers and magazines as well as videos. View the library's guide to databases on the library webpage. (Links to an external site.)
Many papers you'll write in college require "peer-reviewed articles." The "peers" reviewing these articles are experts in the same field as the author; for instance, physics professors will review a physics professor's article.
A professor or other expert submits their article to the editor of a journal in their field. For instance, a psychology professor might submit an article to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. A physicist would submit a paper to Applied Physics journal. The editors of these academic journals then ask the authors' peers - other professors or experts in this field - to evaluate the submitted articles. Those experts then submit their comments and reviews back to the editor, who returns them to the author, who answers the criticisms and rewrites portions of the article to satisfy his "peer" reviewers.
You can see why this review of articles would takes months or years. This lengthy review process explains why peer-reviewed journals - also known as scholarly or academic journals - publish only two or four times a year.
Your instructors want to know you can find peer-reviewed articles. This means using limiters to narrow your search results in databases to find these articles. Librarians can help you with this. Databases vary greatly and each offers different features. We can't cover them all here, but we can use a search in one of the more widely used databases as an example. Start from the library's homepage (Links to an external site.) and click on the "Articles" tab, shown in black in the illustration below. From the left drop-down menu, we'll use a database that includes nearly 4,000 full-text, peer-reviewed journals, Academic Search Complete, highlighted in blue, above
How do you judge whether a website is credible? Some of hallmarks of a credible website are:
The last three letters of a url (uniform resource locator) or link will tell you a great deal about who owns a website, who writes the content and what their purpose is. To find out more about a website, check it on Whois.
| TLD* | Abbreviation for: | Who uses it | Url of example website |
| .com | commercial | commercial entities | https://www.amazon.com/ |
| .edu | education | universities and colleges | https://www.berkeley.edu/ |
| .gov | government | U.S. government | https://www.usgs.gov/ |
| .net | network | network infrastructure | https://www.slideshare.net/ |
| .org | organization | nonprofit organizations | https://www.sierraclub.org/ |
| .mil | military | U.S. military | https://www.marines.mil/ |
*top-level domain
In this exercise, you and a few classmates will examine a website. Click on your assigned link to find:
| Link | Top-level domain | Author & audience | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website Five |
Instructors asking you to use credible sources may also use Turnitin.com to evaluate your citations to see whether you use scholarly, academic or peer-reviewed, or popular. See the box below to determine whether a source is "scholarly" or "popular."
