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Peer Review (2-minute video)
What is authority? (4-minute video)
Further Reading
Evaluating Research in Academic Journals-4th Ed by
* A supplementary guide for students who are learning how to evaluate reports of empirical research published in academic journals. * Your students will learn the practical aspects of evaluating research, not just how to apply a laundry list of technical terms from their textbooks. * Each chapter is organized around evaluation questions. For each question, there is a concise explanation of how to apply it in the evaluation of research reports. * Numerous examples from journals in the social and behavioral sciences illustrate the application of the evaluation questions. Students see actual examples of strong and weak features of published reports. * Commonsense models for evaluation combined with a lack of jargon make it possible for students to start evaluating research articles the first week of class. * The structure of this book enables students to work with confidence while evaluating articles for homework. * Avoids oversimplification in the evaluation process by describing the nuances that may make an article publishable even though it has serious methodological flaws. Students learn when and why certain types of flaws may be tolerated. They learn why evaluation should not be performed mechanically. * This book received very high student evaluations when field-tested with students just beginning their study of research methods. * Contains more than 60 new examples from recently published research. In addition, minor changes have been made throughout for consistency with the latest edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.
ISBN: 9781884585784Publication Date: 2010-09-01
Evaluating Scholarship and Research Impact by
Faculty members, scholars, and researchers often ask where they should publish their work; which outlets are most suitable to showcase their research? Which journals should they publish in to ensure their work is read and cited? How can the impact of their scholarly output be maximized? The answers to these and related questions affect not only individual scholars, but also academic and research institution stakeholders who are under constant pressure to create and implement organizational policies, evaluation measures and reward systems that encourage quality, high impact research from their members. The explosion of academic research in recent years, along with advances in information technology, has given rise to omnipresent and increasingly important scholarly metrics. These measures need to be assessed and used carefully, however, as their widespread availability often tempts users to jump to improper conclusions without considering several caveats. While various quantitative tools enable the ranking, evaluating, categorizing, and comparing of journals and articles, metrics such as author or article citation counts, journal impact factors, and related measures of institutional research output are somewhat inconsistent with traditional goals and objectives of higher education research and scholarly academic endeavors. This book provides guidance to individual researchers, research organizations, and academic institutions as they grapple with rapidly developing issues surrounding scholarly metrics and their potential value to both policy-makers, as evaluation and measurement tools, and individual scholars, as a way to identify colleagues for potential collaboration, promote their position as public intellectuals, and support intellectual community engagement.
ISBN: 9781787563872Publication Date: 2018-06-26
ISBN: 9781483311937
Evaluating Sources During the Initial Search Process
When you first encounter a potential source, you'll want to know very quickly whether it is worth reading in detail and considering for your research. To avoid wasting time on unhelpful sources as much as possible, you can the following two strategies to evaluate your sources during the initial search process.
- Understand the different types of sources you will most likely encounter in your research. The Information Pyramid below describes the most common types of sources and arranges them in a pyramid shape with the least reliable at the bottom and the most reliable at the top. By understanding the type of sources that fill your information need, you can focus on those more quickly while searching.
- Ask questions about your sources that help you determine if the source is reliable and appropriate to your information need. The CRAAP mnemonic below offers an easy way to remember to ask questions about your source's currency, reliability, authority, accuracy and purpose.
The Information Pyramid
Image created by Maria R. Barefoot on 6/10/2016
Top of the Pyramid Sources
Literature Review is a comprehensive survey of the works published in a particular field of study or line of research, usually over a specific period of time, in the form of an in-depth, critical bibliographic essay or annotated list in which attention is drawn to the most significant works.
Also, we can define a literature review as the collected body of scholarly works related to a topic:
- Summarizes and analyzes previous research relevant to a topic
- Includes scholarly books and articles published in academic journals
- Can be an specific scholarly paper or a section in a research paper
An empirical research article (original research) is an article which reports research based on actual observations or experiments. The researcher may have used quantitative methods, which generate numerical data and seek to establish causal relationships between two or more variables, or the researcher may have used qualitative methods, which objectively and critically analyze behaviors, beliefs, feelings, or values with few or no numerical data available for analysis.
A systematic review answers a defined research question by collecting and summarizing all empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria.
A meta-analysis is the use of statistical methods to summarize the results of independent studies. By combining information from all relevant studies, meta-analysis can provide more precise conclusions than an individual study.
Not all systematic reviews contain meta-analysis.
CRAAP Test
A helpful mnemonic to remember the evaluation criteria, CRAAP is an acronym for:
- Currency
- Relevance
- Authority
- Accuracy
- Purpose
Helpful questions for initial evaluation:
- When was this source published?
- Is this source relevant to your topic?
- What are the author or author's qualifications?
- Is the resource scholarly/peer-reviewed?
- Are sources cited to support the author's claims?
- Does the website or journal the sources comes from have a bias to their reporting?
- Do you notice biased or emotional language in the summary or introduction?
- Do you notice spelling or grammatical errors in a quick examination of the source?