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Research Guides

Eastern Washington University Libraries

Spanish

This guide is for Spanish 323 and 491, to aid in locating sources in Spanish.

How Can I Tell if the Article is Scholarly

1. Is there an author(s)?

If you cannot figure out the specific individual(s) who wrote it, you can dismiss it. There is no such thing as anonymous scholarly information.

2. Is there a bibliography or list of references?

If the article does not include a bibliography at the end, or extensive footnotes for references, it is not scholarly. Scholarly knowledge builds on what other scholars have stated.

3. Is it lengthy?

While there are exceptions, scholarly articles are quite lengthy -- 10 to 30 pages long. (Some scientific and medical journal articles are shorter, such as 3 to 5 pages, if they are writing up the results of a concise study they did.)

4. Can you cite the article from the PDF?

When using Redalyc and Dialnet, you will be finding PDFs of the journal articles. You should be able to cite the article from the PDF - author(s), title of the article, title of the journal, volume and issue of the journal, page numbers, and date. And sometimes there is a DOI number. 

If the journal name and page numbers are missing, I would dismiss it. It's not following standard guidelines for an online journal article.