Skip to Main Content
University of Texas University of Texas Libraries

UGS 303: The Beatles and Beyond / Slawek

Scholarly (peer reviewed) sources

Scholarly articles

If you are at the point of looking for scholarship, you are beginning to narrow your focus. Scholarly articles are specific. They are addressing a question in the field and making an argument using other scholarship and primary source analysis as evidence.

I like to explore scholarly articles even early on because it gives me idea of the scope I might need to develop as I write my own research paper.

  • What are people arguing about? What is missing from the literature that I want to explore?
  • Pay attention to how a scholarly article is structured. How does the author lay out their argument? Where do they use evidence?
  • If a particular piece of evidence is compelling to you as a reader, seek it out on its own. It may open up another perspective and help you explore your own topic ideas.

What does it mean when someone calls an article scholarly, academic, or peer reviewed?

For your annotated bibliography and your paper you need to find 6 scholarly sources.

Who writes these articles?

Experts in their fields. For history, culture or media research, that likely means professors at universities

Why do they write in these journals and not in magazines or newspapers or in books?

The most rigorous research happens in these journals. Publishing in these journals assures that your research will be read and cited by experts within your field of study. This research is the most up to date - once research is published here, it can be referenced for a general audience in newspapers or magazines, or it may be referenced in a more comprehensive work, such as a book. Having an article published in a journal is prestigious and may be a factor in getting and keeping one's job at a university. No, authors do not get paid by these publications. 

How do I access these journals?

These journals are very expensive to subscribe to. This university provides access to many, and will borrow from other libraries on your behalf so you have virtually complete access to scholarship. You can search within the databases I recommend and Google Scholar (but use the link to GS that I provide since it links with our subscriptions). 

Wait, are books scholarly?

Look for books that are authored by an academic and/or published by an academic press (affiliated with a university), meant for an audience of serious researchers in the field. Academic books don't always go through the same peer review process as articles, but it is an equally rigorous process. 

It's also possible that a scholar or expert will write a more popular-leaning book, meant to be read by a non-academic audience and published on a non-academic press. Judge these sources on an individual basis. 

Ask a Librarian

Chat With Us

EID login required

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.