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How do I find scholarly websites about student loans and bankruptcy as a topic?

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Answered By: Linda Kern
Last Updated: Dec 12, 2016     Views: 27

If this assignment is for AS111, the assignment was clarified to ask for a reliable website, not a scholarly one. What you really need is a credible, reliable web site. Scholarly and reliable are two different ideas. 

A source that is scholarly will be reliable. Scholarly sources are (as you know from our video at http://www.screencast.com/t/9F6j6Qv89e !) are evaluated based on the credentials of the author, the intended audience, the level of vocabulary used, the amount of background knowledge needed to understand the content, and the presence of references. Therefore a scholarly web site would be written by PhDs, Masters, or other researchers for PhDs, Masters, or other researchers, using a college level vocabulary. It would require an advanced understanding of the subject to comprehend the information, and it would include references.

A reliable source may not be scholarly. A source can be evaluated for its reliability using our sources at http://libguides.brenau.edu/webeval or http://www.screencast.com/t/SHVwurpjEnHR .

There are relatively few scholarly web sites that do not use journal articles or book chapters as their content. Given the extreme rarity of true scholarly web sites (scholarly content formatted originally as an informative web site), I suggest you search for scholarly books and journal articles or search for a reliable web site. It is highly unlikely that your target exists.

If you need to, feel free to have your professor contact me for more information on scholarly web sites.

To find a reliable web site on student loans and bankruptcy, I suggest you Google "student loans" bankruptcy site:.gov. The quotation marks are important to focus the results. The site:.gov in the search will narrow the results to only government web sites, where you can find all kinds of reliable information about the topic.

Watch out for the ads at the beginning of the results! There are commercial companies who are in it for the money - often getting former students to pay for things they can do themselves for free.

Ads look like this:

The search yields information from several reliable sites, including the U.S. Courts, the federal student aid site, and the text of H.R. 449, the proposed Discharge Student Loans in Bankruptcy Act of 2015 from the Government Printing Office.

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