HIST 120 The Pacific World Class Guide

For this assignment, you will need to evaluate the source that you select in order to ensure that it is high-quality. This is a large part of the Information Literacy Assignment.

Questions you will want to ask of the article:

• Who is the author of the article?
  Authors of peer-reviewed articles are experts in the field. They have likely completed a dissertation in this field and may be professors at a college or university.
• What is the journal?
  Even journals have differing levels of credibility. The journals that you find in JSTOR are likely published by University Presses or academic publishers.
• Is the article peer-reviewed?
  See below for more information!
• Does the article cite high-quality information also?
  Look at the bibliography of your selected article. If they are citing high quality resources, they are entering the scholarly conversation around this topic.

Peer-review is a process by which an article is verified by a group of scholars before it is published.

When an author submits an article to a peer-reviewed journal, the editor passes out the article to a group of scholars in the related field (the author's peers). They review the article, making sure that its sources are reliable, the information it presents is consistent with the research, etc. Only after they give the article their "okay" is it published.

The peer-review process makes sure that only quality research is published: research that will further the scholarly work in the field.