Answered Questions

Hello,

It makes complete sense to us that you are having trouble finding a scholarly website.  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 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 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 .

All of this is our very long winded way of saying that there are relatively few scholarly web sites that do not use journal articles or book chapters as their content and that truly scholarly websites are extremely rare.

One of the easiest ways to ensure that you are finding reliable information is to look for certain types of websites.  .Edu denotes an school/educational website.  .Gov denotes a governmental website.  In general, you will find reliable information on school and governmental websites.  You still need to evaluate the information but you can have more of an expectation that the information will be reliable unlike .com sites which are commercial and therefore more suspect.  So, to find a reliable website I googled site:edu servant leadership. This limited my results to educational websites on the topic of servant leadership.  To determine whether the source is reliable, I click on it and look for "About Us" links on the site that will give me information about the sources behind the publication. I can also evaluate it based on the checklist from the video linked above. 

You can create this exact same search limiting your results to only governmental sites by googling site:gov servant leadership.

If you have further questions, please let us know!