Finding and Evaluating Academic Sources

3 lessons · 57 min

What you will learn

• Build effective search strings
• Judge credibility and relevance
• Tell peer-reviewed work from other material

Lessons

• 1. Searching systematically
• 2. Evaluating a source
• 3. Reading a research article efficiently

Searching systematically

Break your question into concepts, list synonyms for each, then combine them: synonyms with OR, concepts with AND. Use quotation marks for phrases and filters for year, language and document type.

Search more than one database. Arabic-language research is often indexed in regional databases and university repositories that global tools miss.

Example

("blended learning" OR "hybrid learning") AND ("student engagement" OR participation) AND (university OR "higher education")

Exercise

Build a search string for your project and run it in two databases from the Library page.