1. Using Tripod, find one peer-reviewed journal article which is relevant to your research topic or interest. This article should be from within the past 5 years.
2. Using one of the other databases listed on this page, find a second relevant scholarly journal article.
A scholarly source is one that was written by scholars--oftentimes a professor or other professional researcher, often with specialized training in that area--for a scholarly audience, or by experts for experts. These contrast with popular sources, which speak to a general audience.
Scholars publish articles, which are basically essays, in scholarly journals. Journals are like a scholarly or academic magazine in that they come out at regular intervals and feature many of these articles, written by different scholars. Journals may be pretty general, where some might just be for classical studies or microbiology, or they can get extremely specific, focusing on very particular topics.
The editors of journals decide whether to publish what scholars submit, and usually the deciding factor is a process called peer-review. Essentially, this acts as quality control: the author's professional peers, i.e., other professors and professional researchers, evaluate the work to see if it is of good scholarly quality and if it makes a meaningful contribution to the field. They and the editors also engage in a (often indirect, because peer-review is usually anonymous) process of critique and response wherein the paper is often improved, based on critical scholarly feedback. This is like a professional version of the peer editing you will do in many of your classes.
Tripod is good for finding articles, too, in addition to books. It is our library's most comprehensive database, and allows you to search through most everything that is contained in our more specific databases.
Below is a list of other databases which might be useful for your research in this class, too.
