Q. How do I know if a source is peer-reviewed or scholarly?

Scholarly means

• written by a scholar,
• with a lot of citations of good sources and original research,
• edited by a scholarly publisher or journal,
• and a longer work (usually at least 15 pages for a journal article or book chapter, and 150-300 for a book). 

Here's a few tips for finding things that are scholarly, using religion/scripture research as an example.

Check out this guide on how to tell if a source is scholarly:

https://libguides.regent.edu/ENGL102/evaluating_resources

Generally, you want to use the library to find these kinds of sources.

Start with this website, our divinity research guide, and try the options listed below:

https://libguides.regent.edu/divinity/databases

1. Use Primo, our main library search, and narrow the search to Articles, which will be peer-reviewed.

In Primo, the books and e-books and book chapters are also usually scholarly.

In Primo, try your topic, or scripture reference, or a phrase like John commentary.

2. Use the divinity databases, especially ATLA, but also the few after ATLA there.

Search for a reference like "John 11" or your topic.

3. Use Google Scholar linked to Regent, but be careful as sometimes there are non scholarly articles (but most are scholarly).

4. You can also sometimes find academic sources in a regular Google search or in the references at the bottom of a Wikipedia page.

Get our LibKey browser tool to link to our sources (which are generally scholarly) if you see them cited on the web.

This and everything else are at the link at the top of this message.