Scholarly sources help you develop an academic argument for your research. Books and scholarly journals are two major scholarly sources you will need for your research work. You have probably heard from your instructor or supervisor that you would need to read peer-reviewed works. So what does peer review mean and how do we check if a work is peer-reviewed?
Peer review is a quality control process before a scholarly work is published. Watch this short video to learn what peer review is.
Source: NC State University Libraries (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
Both OneSearch and many library databases offer the option to limit search results to "Peer-reviewed" works only. Here are a few examples:
Some databases are highly selective and only cover peer-reviewed journals, e.g. Web of Science, Scopus. This means that you will only find peer-reviewed articles when searching on these databases.
For postgraduate students, you may need to start reading from the top journals in your research field. There are a couple of tools to help you identify the top journals according to certain citation metrics.