Articles that appear in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals are different than the articles you see in magazines, newspapers and on the Web.
Ask yourself these questions to get you thinking about the differences between the types of information you might use as evidence.
When a researcher - or a team of researchers - completes their research project or study, they report their findings in academic journals.
Each discipline has journals familiar to researchers in that field. Experts in a field mostly read and write for the same journals, contributing to and building off of conversations.
The articles they write up are sent to a panel of the author(s) peers for review in a double blind process - the author and the reviewers do not know one another's identity. The reviewers send the article back to the author for suggested revisions and questions.
The reviewers are looking to see that the author is using methods familiar to the field in a reliable and ethical manner.
They are looking to see that the authors have engaged with the pre-exisiting research in the field and are building off of that research to take the topic into a new and meaningful direction.
Being published in an academic journal is prestigious, but it does not come with payment from the journal. In order to obtain tenure, faculty have to demonstrate their contributions to the field through articles published in top journals in their field.
You may access these articles through the subscriptions paid for on your behalf by the UT Libraries. Journals are organized by discipline and type in databases. UT Libraries purchases more collections than all but 9 libraries in the US.
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