Sociology Databases

What is peer-review?
The rigorous process that articles undergo before they are published. Scholars in the author's field or discipline review and evaluate the article for quality and validity. If lacking, the article may be rejected. Reviewers often offer suggestions for revision as a condition of acceptance. Watch Peer Review in 3 Minutes (NCSU) for more details.

This chart is adapted from Northwestern University's Evaluating Articles page.

1. Read your text straight through. Next to each paragraph, write a number between 0 and 3 to indicate your level of understanding, with 0 meaning you do not understand it at all and 3 meaning you feel very confident that you fully understand the meaning of the paragraph.
2. Go back and reread the article, focusing on paragraphs that you gave less than a 3. Would you change your ratings after a second time through?
3. For those paragraphs that are still a 0 or 1, what would help you understand them?
   1. Is there a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary? If so, underline the unfamiliar words and look up their meanings.
   2. What do you know already about the topic in the paragraph? Does thinking about this help you understand the content better?
   3. What do you know about the genre type? For example, is it a scholarly article? If so, does it follow a typical format with a literature review, methodology, results, and discussion? If so, can you understand what is most important by rereading certain sections of the article?
   4. Under what context was this text written? Think about who, what, where, and why. Does this help you understand the text any better, or does it reveal things you need to find out in order to understand it?

adapted from Broussard, Mary Snyder. Reading, Research, and Writing: Teaching Information Literacy with Process-Based Research Assignments. Association of College and Research Libraries, 2017, p. 82.

There are 4 easy steps you can take to verify sources and claims on the web.

1. Stop. Pause before you share or use. What is your emotional response to the information? What biases do you have? Also, consider what you already know about the topic and the source. Do you know and trust the website or source of the information? If not, use the other moves to get a sense of what you're looking at. If you find yourself falling down the rabbit hole of fact-checking STOP and recall your goal. Approach the problem at the right amount of depth for your purpose.

2. Investigate the Source. You can usually do this with a quick web or Wikipedia search. Taking 60 seconds to figure out its origin before reading will help you decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you to better understand its significance and trustworthiness.

3. Find Trusted Coverage. Look for other trusted reporting or analysis on the topic. Has a source you consider authoritative covered the same news or topic? Has it has been fact-checked or rebutted? Scan multiple sources to see what the consensus seems to be. Find coverage that better suits your needs—more trusted, more in-depth, or maybe just more varied.

4. Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media Back to the Original Context. Stuff you see on the web is often commentary on the re-reporting of re-reporting on some original story or piece of research. Is your original source describing it accurately or misrepresenting the original? Here's an example of how to trace this.

Additionally, a lot of things you find on the internet have been stripped of context. Looking for the context can help inform you of the source's reliability.

Adapted from https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/ by Mike Caulfield