FOR60200 Research Methodology in Forensic Science and Analytics: Home

Peer review is the process through which scholarly research is published. A peer reviewed journal is one that has an editorial board composed of subject matter experts, who review all author submissions to the journal and select only the most relevant and reliable studies for publication in the journal. For this reason, material found in scholarly journals is considered to be less biased and more reliable. Most of your assignments that require research will specify that you must use scholarly sources. 

Speaking of scholarly sources - this phrase refers primarily to articles and book chapters. If you tried searching for scholarly books, you wouldn't have much luck, because for books the concept works differently.

How do you make sure you are using scholarly sources? When searching in databases from EBSCO, Proquest, and similar systems, look for a checkbox or other search option that is labeled "Scholarly Sources" or "Limit to Scholarly/Peer-reviewed."

How do you look at a source and tell if it is scholarly? There are usually several clues.

• First, check to see if there is a list of references at the end of the article. Scholarly materials will almost always have a list of citations.
• Second, look at who the authors are (this is usually listed on the first page of the article). Scholarly articles tend to be written by authors with some kind of university affiliation, such as professor, department head, etc.
• Third, try looking up the website for the journal the article is published in (just put the journal title into an Internet search). The website will often have an About section, and if the journal is scholarly or peer reviewed, this will usually be mentioned.

Can you ever use non-scholarly sources? Certainly! A major category of non-scholarly sources are factual sources like newspaper articles or news magazines such as Time and Newsweek. News sources are not scholarly because they are not reviewed by a team of scholars, but they can still be trustworthy. If you use non-scholarly sources in your papers, it will usually be to provide support for a fact you are discussing or to give an example of a current trend.

Then again, they can also be untrustworthy, since some media outlets are openly biased. If you need help evaluating how trustworthy a source is, you can always ask your instructor or a librarian.

One of the pieces of feedback we receive fairly often from users is that, "The library databases are too user-unfriendly and too difficult to use. I just use Google Scholar."

Certainly there are advantages to Google Scholar. We are used to using Google for searching everything - it's easy. It's also fast; you can use it very quickly, which is important for those dividing their time between work, family life, and higher education. Google Scholar also has features not always found in library databases, such as the "Cited By" link under each of its search results.

With that being said, there are also drawbacks to Google Scholar:

• Google Scholar pulls in scholarly and non-scholarly content with no way to limit a search to one or the other
• Google Scholar covers a wide range of topics, but many of these are not covered with much depth
• The search options available in Google Scholar are quite limited compared to those available in library databases
• Many results that come up in Google Scholar do not have links to the full text, or require users to purchase access

So what should you do? You should feel free to use Google Scholar as a starting point or to generate ideas, but you should also use library databases, even if it means asking for help or spending some time getting familiar with them. For example, you might come across an article in Google Scholar that looks interesting, but it has no full text link. You can copy down its title and look it up in the library and get the full text at no charge. It comes down to deciding whether you want to do things the easy way, or the right way.

Brown University libraries have prepared an excellent guide to this topic. You can find it here: https://libguides.brown.edu/evaluate/Read

What is a literature review?

A literature review sounds intimidating, but it is a fairly basic idea. It is simply telling the story of your topic. Imagine that you are interested in a very specific question, such as the reliability of polygraph testing. Next, imagine that you are going to explain this topic to a friend who knows nothing about the subject. You can't just jump right in to the heart of the matter, because your friend will be completely lost. First you'll need to talk about how witnesses and suspects are interviewed as part of an investigation. You will also want to explain how the human body reacts to stress, specifically stress that occurs when attempting to deceive others. This will lead you to talk about how different processes in the body can be monitored and measured. 

The only difference between the conversation you are having with your friend and a literature review is that the literature review is written down, and it cites its sources.

How do I write a literature review?

Writing a literature review has a few steps:

• Think about the different subtopics that you need to explain as part of telling the story of your topic. In the example above, subtopics would include physical reactions to stress, interviewing of suspects, etc.
• For each subtopic, find some scholarly sources that do a good job of explaining an aspect of that subtopic. To do this you search library databases and download or request articles, book chapters, and other materials. If some of the sources you want to use need to be requested from other libraries, this step can take a few days. Start early!
• Once you acquire your sources, read them. As you read, highlight passages that are especially well-written, and take notes about what idea(s) you want to pull from each source.
• Start writing. Once you have read the sources for at least one subtopic, start writing - even if you think it doesn't make sense. The key to excellent writing is not being a natural-born Shakespeare; it is being a good editor, and you can't edit your work if you don't write anything to begin with.
  • Some people find this helpful: when you open up a new, blank document, type in the headings you are going to use before you start actually writing the content. This is similar to typing a broad outline of the literature review. You can use headings that are close to what you will use in the final paper, or just generic headings like Subtopic One, Subtopic Two, etc. Having this bare bones structure in place helps manage the anxiety of a massive, blank page - it reminds you of what you are talking about and where you are headed.