What are Scholarly Sources?
Contents









What are Scholarly Sources?
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Evaluating Sources
Adequate Sources
Reliable Sources
Scholarly Sources
Peer-Reviewed Sources
Relevant Sources
What are Scholarly Sources?
An essay is only as good as the sources you use for your research. Your History essays must be based on trustworthy,
academic primary and secondary sources. This module will help you to choose reliable sources, to avoid unscholarly
sources, and to evaluate the relevance of the sources for your research.
Contents
Primary Sources
Most good history writing relies on a combination of primary and secondary sources. While you will not usually be required
to use primary sources in your first year essays (although you are encouraged to use them if you wish), they are frequently
required in upper year History courses. Primary sources are original, first-hand materials such as:








government documents, public records, statistics
letters, diaries, manuscripts
interviews, eye-witness accounts
political cartoons, newspaper announcements and articles
photographs, artwork
maps, charts
meeting minutes
songs, or original works of literature
Primary sources provide the raw evidence for your argument. In general, a primary source is information, an artefact,
creative work, or document without any accompanying interpretation. The exceptions to this rule are first-hand accounts,
newspaper and/or journal articles, chronicles, histories, and other texts that are written within the same period as the event
you are researching. For example, articles written about lynching and segregation while lynching and segregation were still
active in the American south are considered primary sources, even though they probably contain some analysis of the
events described. Analytical accounts written within the same period as the events they describe are usually considered
primary sources since their authors are responding to immediate events and are immersed in the period in which the event
takes place.
Contents
Secondary Sources
Secondary sources are books or articles that analyze and interpret historical events. The authors of secondary sources use a
combination of primary sources and other secondary sources to build an argument about the particular event they are
examining. The author of a secondary text is generally not responding to an immediate event or problem. Rather, the
author is looking at the event from some distance. Examples of secondary works include:





journal articles or chapters in scholarly books
monographs (i.e. book-length works on a scholarly subject)
textbooks (not usually considered a reliable scholarly source)
encyclopedias (not usually considered a reliable scholarly source)
websites (not usually considered a reliable scholarly source)
Secondary sources can provide you with general knowledge and specific details about your subject, but more importantly,
they can suggest different ways to interpret your subject. Often the authors of secondary sources will disagree on how to
interpret a historical event. You must read these sources critically. In your essay, you can use secondary sources either to
offer a contrary point of view that you want to challenge or to back up your own argument. When you use secondary
sources in an essay, you are, in a sense, entering into a dialogue with other authors and commenting on primary material
indirectly.
Contents
Evaluating Sources
Before you dive into your research, it is important to do a preliminary evaluation of the sources available to make sure of
the following:



There are adequate sources.
The sources are reliable.
The sources are relevant.
Contents
Adequate Sources
Most Professors assigning a History essay will specify a minimum number of sources that you are expected to cite in your
essay. This usually means that you will need to consult more books or articles than this in order to find the most
appropriate, useful, and scholarly sources. Thus, it is essential that you make sure that sufficient relevant and reliable
sources are available. In our day-to-day life, we are used to being able to track down most of the information we are
looking for quickly and easily on the Internet. When we are researching for an academic essay, however, the best
information and sources may be more difficult to find. Internet sources are normally not considered reliable, unless they are
previously published scholarly sources or scholarly books. You will usually need to go to a university library or an archive to
find sources for History essays. Even then, not all sources are easy to access, but this is no reason to give up on a topic of
interest to you. Persistent and skilled researchers can dig up sources that are hard to find, and the library staff is always
ready to help in this respect.
Trent has access to hundreds of scholarly journals both in print and online, and through RACER, our interlibrary loan
system, you can borrow books from libraries across Canada. Learning to access these resources will make your research
easier and more effective. Even so, it is important to know when the materials you are looking for are too difficult to get
your hands on within the time allotted, or when, in some cases, they simply don't exist. Do some preliminary research to
make sure there are enough accessible resources available on your topic before you commit yourself to it. Even the most
enthusiastic of researchers cannot make something out of nothing.
Contents
Reliable Sources
Topics that are popular or controversial may have a great deal written about them, but how much of it is reliable? In an
academic essay, it is important that the sources you use are accurate, thorough, balanced, and verifiable. While you can
and should use the skills outlined in the Critical Reading module to evaluate your sources, these skills are not enough to
determine whether a source can be considered reliable. If you are using a source to back up your argument in an scholarly
essay, it is important that the source be considered reliable not only by you, but also by other academics in general. When
choosing your sources look for works that are:


scholarly, and/or
peer-reviewed.
Some types of sources are not considered reliable:



textbooks because they tend to be superficial and because the authors are rarely experts on the broad subject
areas they cover.
encyclopedias because they are usually brief, lack footnotes to sources, and may or may not be written by an
expert.
websites will usually not be accepted by your professors as scholarly sources because they tend to be brief,
superficial, and lack scholarly apparatus. It is usually hard to judge what the scholarly qualifications of the author
are. It is fine to use scholarly articles and primary sources that have been posted on the web after publication in
print form.
It is fine to use these kind of sources as a starting place, but they shouldn't be final sources for your essays.
NB: Some of the sources you use, whether primary or secondary, will clearly be biased or incomplete. For example, a slaveowner's account of slavery in the American South might well be biased towards slave-owners. His account may use facts or
figures - the life expectancy of slaves, for example - to back up the argument. When using these sources, it is important to
acknowledge their biases and to be wary of the facts and figures provided, but you may wish to use a source that
exaggerates or misrepresents some aspect of a topic in order to illustrate past attitudes and opinions.
Contents
Scholarly Sources
How can you tell if a source is "scholarly"?



Purpose: Scholarly or academic sources may have a political agenda, but their primary purpose is research,
analysis and the pursuit of knowledge. The purpose of non-scholarly sources may be to entertain or to persuade
an audience of a particular point of view, not to present a full and balanced analysis of a topic.
Scope: Scholarly work usually takes a focused and in-depth look at a topic. Non-scholarly sources, on the other
hand, tend to give broad or general overviews of a topic or even if focused, tend not to treat the topic thoroughly
or in any depth. Non-scholarly sources may leave out relevant information that does not support the argument
presented. A good scholarly source, on the other hand, should acknowledge important facts that don't support its
argument and account for them.
Author and Audience: Scholarly sources are written by academics, historians, researchers and experts and are
aimed at other academics, historians, researchers and students. Non-scholarly works tend to be written by people
outside this group and aimed at the general public. A good deal of the information readily available on the Internet
is aimed at the general public and is not considered scholarly. Most scholarly sources are not readily available on


the Internet since their intended audience is academic. These sources are often found either in print, or through
subscription-based web access such as that available through the Trent University library web site.
Documentation: Scholarly works cite their sources so that information can be verified. Non-scholarly sources
may present facts and figures without saying where they come from. These sources cannot be verified. Avoid
secondary sources that do not include copious footnotes or endnotes.
Publisher: Most scholarly books are published by academic publishers, usually university presses. While not every
academic publisher has the word "University" in their title (St. Martin's, Routledge, Boydell and Brewer, and
Blackwell's are some famous exceptions), most do.
Scholarly sources include academic journals, scholarly monographs, and collections of articles.
Contents
Peer-Reviewed Sources
Most of the journals available to you through the university library (both in print and online) are peer-reviewed or refereed.
This means that the articles in them have been reviewed by experts in the field before being published. Unlike web-pages,
or non-academic articles, these articles have passed though a review process and have essentially been given a "stamp of
approval" from other historians. You must still read them critically since there is no topic that historians agree on
unanimously, but when these articles are used in an essay, they will hold more weight than an article or web-page that has
not been peer reviewed or refereed.
There are several ways to determine whether a journal is peer-reviewed. Often academic search engines will allow you to
select "academic journals" as a search option. You can also read the editorial page and/or submission guidelines to find out
whether the journal is peer-reviewed.
Scholarly monographs, or book-length works, also are usually reviewed by the author's peers, both before and after
publication. Looking up reviews of your source in reputable academic journals can give you an idea of how the work was
received by other academics and experts in the field. Be sure, however, to look up more than one review for any given
source since one reviewer may have a drastically different opinion than another.
Contents
Relevant Sources
Although a source may be reliable and scholarly and may even be on your topic, it still might not be relevant for your
research. In order for a source to be relevant it should be:


Contents
Up-to-date: Scholarly opinion has changed over time. Older books may represent views that are no longer
considered valid. A significant shift in the ways historians approach historical subjects occurred in the 60s and 70s,
and earlier sources will not represent the most recent scholarship on a subject. In general, more recent works will
be more relevant, although you may wish to consult certain works that are considered "classics" on a particular
topic. If you use older source, be sure you understand the context in which the work was written and account for
it in your essay.
Narrowly focused and specific to your topic: While you need to read one or two sources that are broad
overviews of your topic for context, general facts and information, in general, sources that have a more narrow
focus may often be more relevant. For example, if you are researching the role of technology in lynching, general
books about technology or about daily life for African Americans in the American South in the early twentieth
century may provide some context for your essay, but won't help to narrow your focus and develop a specific
argument or thesis.