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How to Read a Scholarly Source (humanities)
What your students may not know yet
- Reading scholarly articles is difficult because these texts are written by experts in a narrow field for experts in that same field
- It is not historians writing for other historians, for example, but historians of women in late antiquity reading other scholars' work about women in late antiquity
- Students may not yet be familiar with conversations that experts in a topic area are having - they may not even know that articles capture the existing conversation around a research topic
- Students may not yet be able to recognize or evaluate the research methodologies used in the humanities
- Students may not yet be able to to evaluate the use of and relevance of evidence presented in an article to analyze as evidence in their own research
- Students may not yet be familiar with the jargon and common accepted knowledge in a field
- Articles in the humanities, for example, typically lack the labels and structure of articles in the sciences / social sciences
Supplemental guide for activity
