What you need to find and use

As part of your program you will be asked to prepare assignments that will require you to find and use a range of different types of information. This might include: 

• Scholarly books & ebooks - good starting point
• Peer reviewed academic journal articles 
• Good quality trade magazine articles (e.g. Harvard Business Review, The Economist)
• Industry data, statistics & reports, government reports
• News/media articles (if your assignments specify that you can use this type of resource)
• Grey literature

Refer to the Types of Publication page in Study Smart to find out more about the range of information you might be using in your assignments. Remember, the type of information you will be using will differ depending on your assignment. 

   "Peer reviewed" means that an article is:

• Written by experts 
• An editor and one or more subject specialists review the article before it is published
• Accurate information
• Well-researched
• Contributes to knowledge in a field
• Mainly journal articles
• Published in legitimate journals
• Trust the information given is accurate and reputable

Using peer-reviewed articles means you already know that the research is credible and reliable and you should only need to determine if the content is relevant to your assignment.

While peer-reviewed journal articles are always scholarly, scholarly journal articles are not always peer-reviewed. You may be directed by your unit coordinator to only use peer-reviewed journal articles (in amongst other types of material) in an assignment. If not, you might choose to use scholarly journal articles that have not been peer-reviewed, but you must ensure you evaluate them. 

Look for the peer-reviewed icon in Library Search to identify peer-reviewed articles: 

Video Peer review in three minutes by NC State University Libraries and used under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.