Scholarly sources & JSTOR

Have your instructors been pestering you about using "scholarly" or "non-web" sources for your papers or presentations? What exactly do they mean? And how do you find a scholarly/non-web source anyway?

Well, by "scholarly," they probably just mean a source that was written by an expert in the field, as opposed to something written by a regular old journalist. Something by a professor of art history instead of some reporter at the SF Weekly, for example.

To state the obvious: a good way to find scholarly sources is to search in a database that only has scholarly sources. Well, lucky you, one such database is JSTOR, which you can access from both CCA and SFPL. All you'll find in JSTOR are full-text articles from scholarly journals, so you can rest assured that anything and everything in there should meet your instructor's high standards.

But isn't JSTOR a web source? It is on the web, after all. Well, it turns out that what your instructor really means by "non-web source" is that she wants you to use a source that isn't only available on the web. So JSTOR, which offers digital versions of articles that were originally available in print journals, should be fine (as should the other databases on our articles page). Confusing, I know. But there you have it.

See also:
• in-depth comparison of popular and scholarly sources
• JSTOR at CCA