Please help! In one of my assignments it says “include at least five secondary sources written by professional historians. 2 must be peer reviewed. 3 must be book projects (historical monographs)”
WTF DOES THAT MEAN WHERE DO I FIND THESE THINGS?!? I’m doing my research project on Motherhood during the Transatlantic slave trade. Please someone dumb this down for me. I missed class Monday and it really screwed me.
The tl;dr of this is:
"Don't use Wikipedia, random other internet sources, or pop history. Use journal articles from journals published by academic publishers, and use books published by academic publishers. Use at least three monographs (i.e., full-length books by a single author), and at most two journal articles / contributions to edited books."
Peer-reviewed means that a journal article has been criticized by other scholars in the field and deemed good enough to be published. Peer-reviewed works are typically published in a journal (or other academic publication) which employs peer review as a means of quality assurance; these are either published by universities themselves or by academic publishers.
Its really just a way to say that you're supposed to use sources that adhere to certain standards of rigor; this means that they are "cite-worthy."
(You can recognize academic presses by often being called "*somethingsomething* University Press," or by being major players such as Brill or DeGruyter, etc., and by the books all-too-often being too-expensive-for-normal-consumption. Also, you often should have access via your university login to digital repositories such as JSTOR, Project MUSE, and the respective publishers' digital catalogue; your university's library search should hopefully tell you what you can digitally access through them and what not. Mine does.)
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