21 The Library is Your Friend
Getting Behind the Paywall
In the previous chapter, you read about the information cycle and how many of the best sources and most useful information often ends up behind paywalls. If you don’t have a subscription, then you don’t get to access that high-quality information.
The good news? You actually do have a subscription that grants you access to a lot of that high-quality info. It’s called the library.
Don’t get it wrong – you do pay for some of it (that’s your tuition dollars at work) but SUNY and New York State also provide funding and all of that money pays for premium access to academic databases. (I know the phrase ‘academic databases’ can be intimidating; we’ll get to it.) When you log in with your college credentials, you bypass those paywalls that would otherwise limit or block your access to that high-quality information. Your username and password unlock the verified and in-depth research and scholarly analysis that Google and GenAI tools are locked out of.
So, what does that access get you?
Scholarly or Academic Articles
Scholarly sources sound fancy, don’t they? In reality, that fancy name boils down to this: a scholarly source is an article or book that was written by an expert in the academic field. If you think back to the example from the information cycle chapter – the Titan disaster – the scholarly sources would have been the articles published in the oceanography and engineering journals; those were the sources that were written by researchers or subject matter experts and published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Let’s Define
When college professors and librarians talk about research, you’ll often hear the terms “scholarly” and “peer-reviewed” used, sometimes interchangeably. But what do they actually mean?
- Scholarly articles are written by subject-matter experts, often appear in journals, and include bibliographies, but may or may not be fully, carefully reviewed.
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Peer-reviewed articles, on the other hand, are subjected to careful scrutiny and are reviewed by multiple other subject-matter experts. Peer-reviewed articles are also blind, which eliminates any potential bias or conflict of interest.
Databases typically have a checkbox you can click to confine your search to peer-reviewed content. OCC’s Coulter Library search has filters to narrow down search results specifically to peer-reviewed sources.
Some content adapted from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-esc-wm-englishcomposition1/chapter/text-intermediate-research-strategies/