What are scholarly materials?

So what are scholarly, academic or peer-reviewed literature or materials? Well, scholarly, academic and peer-reviewed mean roughly the same thing: materials which have gone through more than one set of eyes, so have been peer-reviewed and refereed (actually, often expertly reviewed). To shorten the term, let's go with scholarly material from here on in. 

Where do scholarly materials come from? They are educational writing, largely created within academia, as public goods, created "on a not-for-profit basis, since their producers [cf authors] normally do not receive financial compensation" (Pfeiffer, 2006, p. 4). Some think that the "purest form" of public, not for profit goods, comes as a "the paper in a scientific journal" (p. 4). Authors, journalists and novelists earn a living from writing, while academics earn little or nothing (Pfeiffer, 2006); they do get reputation. And pressure to publish. A colleague of mine wrote a seminal text, and got a dollar for every copy sold. The publishing house earned $149 (less costs, of course).

Then there's the peer-review provided for academic articles, which is yet another academic freebie, "performed by scholars [... and] not paid either" (Pfeiffer, 2006, p. 4, citing Harnad 1999). Read more here. 

To come back to scholarly materials, they include academic articles and texts, alongside two other main clusters - theses and conference proceedings. I briefly detail them below in decreasing-ish order of strength, validity and reliability: 

1. journal articles - i.e. published in a journal where other experts thoroughly review it and may require multiple tranches of changes before publication; 
2. university theses - masters and doctoral - where two expert markers will have reviewed the claims and may also require changes prior to publication. NB: PhD theses have much more oversight and rigour, and provide that significant original contribution to knowledge (SOCK), where Master's theses are weaker; 
3. conference proceedings - as the conference committee will have reviewed the abstracts before accepting the presentations; and 
4. referenced textbooks - because the publisher themselves have hopefully fact-checked before publication.

RMIT (2022) has a very quick explanation of what good quality, scholarly literature is:

Grey literature - government publications such as reports may not have necessarily been peer reviewed. I fact, they mayn't have had any external or internal scrutiny or fact-checking. Logically therefore, these type of reports are considered less reliable than scholarly literature. But there are some grey areas (ha, ha) such as census data and government statistics, which are supposed to be carefully and methodically produced (as they too are public goods, funded by society).  

If we do not have ready access to a tertiary library, the place to find good quality scholarly sources is the NZ version of GoogleScholar, here: https://scholar.google.co.nz/

Put in some key words and see how your search goes (and more on how to run searches here).

To read more on scholarly literature, check past articles here.

Sam

References:

GoogleScholar. (2027). Home. https://scholar.google.co.nz/

Pfeffer, T. (2006). Open Knowledge Resources for Higher Education: Scholarly Publications, Course Materials, Academic Software [paper]. IFF Science Communication and Higher Education Research, University of Klagenfurt, Vienna Austria, 13-14 September. https://issuelab.org/resources/1497/1497.pdf

RMIT University Library Videos. (2022, January 2022). What's a scholarly source? [video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/mmJlV642eTo