Question

where can I find scholarly websites? Are all edu and gov websites consider scholarly? My topic is "tablets replacing textbooks"

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Hello! Finding a scholarly website I have found to be very tricky! VERY CHALLENGING! Yesterday, I contacted the Ask Librarian in which they were very helpful. They also agreed that finding scholarly books and articles are not difficult, but websites are. I watched the tutorials and was educated on what to type in the Boolean and how to limited the domains to .edu and .gov sites.
Finally, I came up with eric.ed.gov. The librarian through Brenau came up with www.ed.gov; however the document had no last updates, references, or writers listed, which made this not a good source. Every document in www.ed.gov that I clicked into was not relevant. I thought all websites with .edu and .gov could be trusted. Can they all be or is that not true?

Answered By: Linda Kern
Last Updated: Dec 12, 2016     Views: 13162

Hello,

Scholarly and reliable are two different ideas. A reliable source may not be scholarly. A source that is scholarly will be reliable.

A source can be evaluated for its reliability using our sources at http://libguides.brenau.edu/webeval or http://www.screencast.com/t/SHVwurpjEnHR .

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.

Although www.ed.gov is reliable, and it may have some scholarly content, it is not wholly scholarly. The same can be said for eric.ed.gov. ERIC has scholarly articles, but it also has a lot of other stuff. It is reliable, bit not entirely scholarly. Scholarly content such as books or journal articles, which may be digital or in print, adapts to being digitized and put on web sites. Scholarly content doesn't adapt well to the format of a traditional web site. There are relatively few scholarly web sites that are not sites containing journal articles or book chapters. Here is an example of a scholarly web site, although not all of the references are published: http://www.rc.umd.edu/ . As you can see, it contains articles and conference presentations. 

I'm not aware of any web search engine that filters for scholarly content. Even Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com , which indexes scholarly information, also contains some other stuff. A search of your topic on Google Scholar yielded no scholarly web sites.

It's my understanding you are looking for a scholarly web site that is not journal articles or book chapters. Given the extreme rarity of scholarly sites, I suggest you search for scholarly books and journal articles (there are plenty on your topic) 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.

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