Academic Writing Tips & Resources

The ability to distinguish between scholarly and non-scholarly sources is required for university-level writing. Especially, when your instructor assign you to use only scholarly sources, being able to know the difference will be much more important.

Scholarly sources are,

• written by experts in academic or professional fields
• written for scholars or researcher
• written in a formal style and use formal language (jargon)

Scholarly articles are published in scholarly journals and are sometimes called peer-reviewed/refereed articles.

Scholarly articles are excellent sources for finding out what has been studied or researched on a topic.

Click here to see NCSU Libraries Anatomy of a Scholarly Article tutorial. In this tutorial the first and last pages of a scholarly article is presented. Click on the highlighted areas of the article to learn about clues to look for when identifying scholarly articles.