Scholary reference?

What exactly is a Scholary Reference?

YOU MEAN Scholarly Reference?

UMM...The best place to find scholarly resources is through at college, university, medical library or other educational library. Most public libraries do not contain many scholarly references and those which are available are not as likely to be up-to-date. Academic libraries are designed to meet the needs of scholars making this is the best place to look. Generally, you'll save time by driving a little further to a scholarly library instead of searching a public library with limited resources.

School library are increasingly providing many good, scholarly resources through the web. Generally these are accessible through your home computer with a password. When you start at a new school, it is good to quickly become familiar with these resources. It will save you time and frustration.

In general, most scholarly resources are not available for free. If you find a free web resource, then you may want to do some double checking to make sure it's scholarly. Your school generally pays a substantial amount of money for you, your professors, and other students to have access to these online resources. This is why they are password protected.

Journals versus Magazines

Rarely are magazine scholarly. If you can find the periodical at your local Barnes and Noble, it's probably intended for a more lay audience. If you are unsure you may want to take into consideration the peer review and intended audience factor discussed below.

There are some interesting exceptions, though. Some professional organizations provide newsletters or magazine style publications which are scholarly. The most common example is the APA Monitor. Another is the Perspectives magazine of the Association for Humanistic Psychology (click here to see AHP Perspectives on the web for an example). While these may be considered scholarly, you still want to use them sparingly. These are articles "in brief" and generally are not as in depth as a journal article. If you rely too much on these your professor will become suspicious that you may be trying to avoid doing the work of the paper.

Web Pages

Most web pages, even when they are developed by scholars, are not scholarly sources. Again, you are going to want to take a look at the questions of intended audience and peer review discussed in more detail below. In brief, for a web page to be scholarly it should be intended for a professional audience and be peer-reviewed. Below I provide examples of two web sites which I constructed which are NOT scholarly resources and one which is a scholarly resource. Take a brief look at each one of these sites and see if you can determine why the first two websites are not scholarly and why the third website is scholarly.

Non-Scholarly Websites:

http://www.spirituality-and-therapy.com

http://www.existential-therapy.com

Scholarly Website:

http://www.depth-psychotherapy-network.com

The first website you will quickly notice is written primarily for a lay audience. It was written by a scholar (Ph.D., person in academia) so it appears to be a scholarly source. However, it is not written for a scholarly audience.

The second website is a bit trickier. While it has some information which is intended for a lay audience, it is primarily written for students and scholars interested in learning more about existential theory. It is written by a scholar (Ph.D., person in academia) for a professional audience. So why is it not scholarly? The key is that it is not peer reviewed. Anyone with a degree can publish a website for other professionals. This doesn't make it a scholarly source.

The third website also has some tricks. This is a free resource and most free resources are not scholarly. Some of this website is written for a lay audience, so doesn't that mean it is not a scholarly source? Yes and no. The section written for consumers would not be scholarly. However, the sections written for students and professionals would be scholarly. It has a professional audience and IS peer reviewed.

However, some of the information on this site would be comparable to a professional magazine (such as The APA Monitor or AHP Perspectives) which you would want to use sparingly. Others, such as the articles, would be a more traditional scholarly resource. (Note: as this site is still in development there are limited examples to illustrate these differences).

Being free doesn't banish a source to the non-scholarly land. Because academia needs money to continue its interests, it is difficult to provide many free resources while promoting good scholarship. Oftentimes, free resources are those which are published free to avoid the peer-review process or which were rejected through the peer review process. However, this isn't always the case. There are some altruistic providers of information left!

Self Help Books

Self help books are NOT scholarly resources. Yes, they are written by scholars. Often they may even be written by scholars who are in academia, have written academic books, and are well-respected in their field. But self-help books are written for a lay audience. Additionally, while some self-help books are written by scholars, many are not. While it's just a personal opinion, there are very, very few books in the self-help sections of books stores that are useful beyond being expensive toilet paper! More often than not they create as many problems as solutions!

What Makes a Person a Scholar?

A degree does not make a person a scholar or a credible person to write on a topic. Additionally, the lack of a particular degree does not disqualify them from being a scholar. A scholar, in the sense of someone who produces a scholarly work, is someone who has established expertise in the content area they are writing about. For example, I am not qualified to write a scholarly work on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I took a class on this in graduate school and have read several books on this topic, however; I have not kept up to date on the literature and this is not an area of expertise.

However, I am qualified to write a scholarly work on existential therapy or religious/spiritual issues in psychotherapy. I have obtained specialized training and obtained appropriate experience in this content area to be considered someone with expertise on these topics.

Many sources place degrees behind the authors name to appear scholarly. However, the degree may be in a field not even related to the topic they are writing about! Furthermore, even if the degree is in the same general field, it does not guarantee they are an expert on the topic they are writing about.

Three keys to determining if a person has an appropriate background is 1) appropriate knowledge, 2) appropriate training, and 3) appropriate experience.

OR IN MORE SIMPLE TERMS ( ITS AWAY OF HAVING ALL OF YOUR ACADEMIC PRIORITES IN ORDER. AN EASIER WAY OF KEEPING THINGS TOGETHER,BUT THERE ARE MORE DEFINITIONS FOR IT.

hope I helped

scholarLy references are the sources you reference in your footnotes or citations. mla style is the most common form of referencing for students...

http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/legacylib/mlahcc.html

go here they'll show you every type of mla citation to do