Your instructor may want you to use "peer reviewed" articles as sources for your paper. Or you may be asked to find 
"academic," "scholarly," or "refereed" articles. What do these terms mean?
Let's start with the terms academic and scholarly, which are synonyms. An academic or scholarly journal is one intended for a specialized or expert audience. Journals like this exist in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Examples include Nature, Journal of Sociology, and Journal of American Studies. Scholarly/academic journals exist to help scholars communicate their latest research and ideas to each other; they are written "by experts for experts." Magazines like Time or Scientific American, newspapers, (most) books, government documents, and websites are not peer-reviewed, though they may be thoroughly edited and fact-checked.
Most scholarly/academic journals are peer reviewed; another synonym for peer reviewed is refereed. Before an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal, it's evaluated for quality and significance by several specialists in the same field, who are "peers" of the author. Many times this is a "blind review" where the reviewers do not know who the author is and vice-versa. Reviewers make comments and edits of the article and send those back to author before publication. The article may go through several revisions like this before it finally reaches publication.
How do you find peer-reviewed articles? The easiest way to know if an article is peer-reviewed is to select the "peer-reviewed" (scholarly, refereed, etc) limit in an article database.
How can you tell if an article is peer-reviewed? A couple clues will alert you:
As you become more familiar with an academic discipline, you will learn the peer-reviewed journals in that field.
"I'm writing a paper on World War II."
Often students start their research with a very general topic, even though they may realize the topic is too large to deal with in a 10-15 page paper. Faculty and librarians tell them, "You have to narrow this down." But how do you narrow a topic?
Ask yourself--
You can combine these ideas, "What were the major impacts of WWII on women in France, in the decade after the war?"
What is a subject heading?
A subject heading is a standardized word or phrase used to find and organize books and articles by topic (definition borrowed from Dickinson College Library). They are assigned by librarians who choose from a list of official terms (often called a thesaurus).
Most library catalogs, such as UC's UC Library Search use Library of Congress Subject Headings.
Many article databases have their own thesauri. Sometimes the headings are referred to as "subjects" or "descriptors."
Why would you use a subject heading?
Sometimes keyword searches don't retrieve enough; sometimes they retrieve too much. If this is the case, look at the best search results, click on the titles to see the long form of the record, and look at the official subject headings listed to see if there are some that describe your topic (they are usually clickable).
Are there problems with subject headings?
The Library of Congress updates subject headings and adds new ones as terms become imprecise or outmoded, or new inventions, philosophies and concepts arise. Some subject headings may be considered offensive. Librarians and students have demanded action, but change occurs very very slowly. In one ongoing controversy, Congress intervened.
Read more about Library of Congress Subject Headings.
Watch the trailer for "Change the Subject," a documentary about Dartmouth College students' efforts to change the subject heading "illegal aliens"
"Google Search is in fact an advertising platform, not intended to solely serve as a public information resource in the way that, say, a library might. Google creates advertising algorithms, not information algorithms." -- Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, p. 38
Image courtesy of Link-Assistant.Com
Are Computer Algorithms Biased?
Is Your Software Racist? (Politico 2/7/18)
Racist in the Machine: The Disturbing Implications of Algorithmic Bias (World Policy Journal Winter 2016) (UCB login required for off campus access)
Machine Bias: There's Software Used Across the Country To Predict Future Criminals. And it's Biased Against Blacks (ProPublica 5/3/2016)
How Google's Search Algorithm Spreads False Information With a Rightwing Bias (Guardian 12/16/16)
Competition Commission of India fines Google for abusing dominant position (Reuters 2/8/18)
Here's the Evidence That Google's Search Results Are Horribly Biased (Business Insider 10/2/14)
Can Search Results be Manipulated By Others?
Search Engine Optimization (Wikipedia)
A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data (NY Times 10/26/06, UCB login required for off campus access) website version
10 Notorious Google Bombs (The Atlantic 2/25/11)
Googling for Truth: The Invisible Ways Search Engines Shape Our Opinions (Link-Assistant.Com 2/25/17)
Google Bombing and SEM is Evolving into "Search Engine Activism" (Media Post 1/30/18)
More Reading about Internet Manipulation
Internet manipulation (Wikipedia)
Media Manipulation (Data & Society)
Read more: ebook version of Algorithms of Oppression
When you encounter any kind of source, consider:
How to identify the best terms for relevant search results.
More information:
Introductory Boolean operator tutorial
Advanced tutorial
Cantina Rag by Jackson F. Smith is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) License.
The table below shows which characteristics are more commonly associated with scholarly or popular sources. Both scholarly and popular sources can be appropriate for your research purposes, depending on your research question, but research assignments will often require you to consult primarily with scholarly materials.
| Scholarly | Popular | |
|---|---|---|
| Authors: | Experts such as scientists, faculty, and historians | Generalists, including bloggers, staff writers, and journalists; not always attributed |
| Examples: | Journal of Asian History, New England Journal of Medicine, Chemical Reviews, Educational Psychologist; books from University presses such as Oxford University Press and the University of California Press | Wikipedia, CNN.com, About.com; People Magazine, USA Today; bestselling books; books from popular publishers like Penguin and Random House |
| Focus: | Specific and in-depth | Broad overviews |
| Language: | Dense; includes academic jargon | Easier to read; defines specialized terms |
| Format: | Almost always include: abstracts, literature reviews, methodologies, results, and conclusions | Varies |
| Citations: | Include bibliographies, citations, and footnotes that follow a particular academic style guide | No formal citations included; may or may not informally attribute sources in text |
| Before publication: | Evaluated by peers (other scholars) | Edited by in-house editors or not edited at all |
| Audience: | Specialists in the subject area: students, professors and the author's peers | General readers; shouldn't require any special background |
| Design: | Mostly text, with some tables and charts; very little photography; no advertising | Glossy images, attractive design; photo illustrations and advertising are more common |
| Purpose: | Communicating research findings; education; | Entertainment; news |