2. The scientific method in morphosyntax
2.5. Becoming a linguist: Identifying academic sources
In many of your university-level assignments, you will be asked to engage with academic or scholarly sources. In fact, unless you are told otherwise, you should probably assume that you will be expected to use academic sources by default. In this section, we will learn how to identify academic sources and what the review process is like for academic sources.
What is an academic source?
One of the main ways that an academic source is different from other kinds of publications is that an academic source is usually focused on original research; that is, the author of the source is not only reporting information that is already known about the topic, but is coming up with something new. For example, they could have gathered new data, developed a new theory, or extended an old theory to a new context. This means that academic sources are often very narrow in topic and quite specialized.
Another way academic sources are quite different from other kinds of resources is the peer review process. When an article or another piece of scholarship is peer reviewed, the editor will contact other experts on the topic and ask them to read and critique the manuscript. There will usually be two or three reviewers, who will provide detailed comments on the manuscript and give a recommendation of whether it is suitable for publication. Often, an article will go through multiple rounds of review before it gets published. Different journals and publishers have slightly different processes, but most often the process will be either blind, which means the author doesn’t know who the reviewers are, or double-blind, which means the author doesn’t know who the reviewers are and the reviewers don’t know who the author is.
This process is most typical of an academic journal, but there are other kinds of sources worth mentioning, as well. Most books at a typical bookstore do not describe original research or go through a peer review process, but academic books do. Dissertations include original research but don’t technically go through a peer review process; however, they are defended by the author and approved by a panel of experts, and so they have roughly equivalent status. On the other hand, they are often not as polished as published research.
In contrast, other kinds of publications do not present original research and are not peer-reviewed. Most books in a typical bookstore and the magazines at the check-out counter are what would be called “popular publications.” They are written by professional writers—not necessarily an expert in the topic—for a general audience. Although editors fact-check the content, they are not peer reviewed by experts and have few citations. Trade publications fall in between scholarly and popular publications. They are written for a specific group of people, and so are more specialized, but they still do not report original research, nor are they peer reviewed. An example might be a magazine for dentists summarizing the most recent dentistry tools and techniques.
| Academic source | Popular publication | Trade publication | |
| Content | Original research | News, opinions, and trends | News and opinions about a specific profession or area |
| Audience | Researchers | General | People belonging to a particular profession |
| Author | Researchers | Journalist or professional writer | Member of the field and/or professional writer |
| Citations | Extensive | Few | Few |
| Review | Peer-reviewed | Fact-checked | Fact-checked |
There are also a lot of sources that are not peer reviewed but are sometimes used in academic writing. For example, researchers might post their work in progress on their website or on repositories before it is peer reviewed. Researchers also present their work in progress at conferences, and sometimes write up their presentation in a conference proceedings paper. Depending on the conference, proceedings papers may or may not be peer reviewed. Occasionally, you may even see someone cite a blog post, a social media post, an email, or even a chat in the hallway (usually cited as personal communication, abbreviated p.c.). This is because, no matter how prestigious or not your source is, you need to give appropriate credit.
A common place for linguists, in particular, to post and share their work in progress is on LingBuzz. Although many of the articles are legitimate work-in-progress by academic linguists, most of this work is not peer-reviewed (yet) and anyone can post an article.
When you are doing research, part of your job as a researcher is to evaluate the reliability of your sources. Any source potentially has errors, but a source that has been peer reviewed likely has fewer errors than one that has not been peer reviewed, and an informal source prepared by an expert is more likely to have fewer errors and more nuance than one prepared by a non-expert. Part of how you evaluate the source is by checking whether it is peer reviewed and whether it is authored by an expert. Another big part of evaluating sources is using your critical thinking skills to evaluate the content of the source itself. However, as a student, it is best to use peer-reviewed sources as much as possible. First of all, as a student, you are less likely to identify errors and inconsistencies than someone more experienced. Secondly, if you are doing research for an assignment, likely your instructor wants you to practice identifying and using academic sources.
The peer review process on Wikipedia
Most of us have looked something up on Wikipedia—probably even this week! We rely on it frequently in our daily lives, but professors will often say not to use it for your assignments. How come Wikipedia is good enough for our day-to-day, but not for your homework?
Wikipedia uses a crowd-source volunteer model. That means that anyone with Internet access can create a new Wikipedia page or edit an existing one. You do not even need to login! However, anyone can also flag your edits as incorrect. With millions of users accessing Wikipedia every day, many errors get flagged and corrected very quickly.
However, there are two very big differences between the review process of Wikipedia and the peer review process. First of all, review on Wikipedia is not systematic. It is possible that a minor edit on a little-used page might get missed for quite some time. Second, Wikipedia is not necessarily reviewed by experts. There are some experts on Wikipedia, but there are also lots of amateurs. This means that it is possible that a commonly-believed falsehood might survive on Wikipedia if the majority of volunteer editors believe it to be true.
The kind of false information most likely to survive on Wikipedia is a plausible-sounding fact that most people don’t know. For example, in How I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax about Amelia Bedelia, journalist EJ Dickson describes a prank edit she and a friend, Evan, posted in 2009. Their prank edit claimed that the author of the Amelia Bedelia children’s series, Peggy Parish, spent some of her childhood in Cameroon and based her series on a Cameroonian maid. EJ and Evan expected it to be flagged and removed right away, but not only did it survive Wikipedia’s fact-checkers for 5 and a half years, it got repeated by several reputable sources, including Peggy Parish’s own nephew!
It is still true that Wikipedia can be a very useful source in many ways. However, for anything that matters, you should double-check the information. Edits in Wikipedia are supposed to have sources listed (although they don’t always). Follow the citation to the original source and double-check that the source is reputable and that it actually says what Wikipedia says it says, and then cite the original source.
How to identify an academic source
If you read enough academic papers, you will probably start to notice some patterns about who publishes a lot on certain topics and where they publish, and start to form an understanding about which journals are the most prestigious. However, for most students, this doesn’t really start happening unless they pursue graduate studies. How do you decide who is an expert and which journals are reputable when you’re just starting out?
The author
One of the first steps is to look at the author. Read their bio and google them. Some things to check:
- Do they have a university affiliation?
- Is their research specialty related to the topic of the source?
Graduate students and professors writing in their research area are likely reliable authors.
The web host
Where did you find the article? If you found it through your university library, that is likely a good sign. If it is hosted on an academic publisher’s website, that is also a good sign. However, watch out for websites where people create profiles and share their own research, like ResearchGate and Academia.edu. Many legitimate researchers do post their published and unpublished research on such websites, and Google Scholar searches will find results from those websites. But anyone can create a profile and post an article. Double-check the author’s credentials before citing work posted by the author, especially if it is unpublished.
The publisher
If the paper is formally published, who published it? If it’s published by a university press, it is likely a scholarly source. Additionally, some for-profit publishers specialize in academic publishing, while others specialize in trade or popular publications, so who the publisher is can be a big clue about what kind of publication it is. You can google a publisher to discover their specialty.
Some academic publishers who publish a lot of work in linguistics written in English include:
- Cambridge University Press
- Elsevier
- John Benjamins
- Kluwer
- MIT Press
- Mouton de Gruyter
- Oxford University Press
- Springer
- Wiley Blackwell
The open access revolution in linguistics
Have you ever been frustrated by the paywalls on academic articles? You’re not alone! Academic articles are researched, written, and edited by academics. These academics do not usually get paid by the journals for their work; instead, it is considered necessary service to their profession. Publishers may take care of copy-editing, formatting, printing, and web-hosting of the final product, but over time, more and more of that work has been automated or has been passed on to the unpaid academic editors. And yet, publishers continue to increase the subscription fees that university libraries have to pay in order to get access to the journal articles.
In 2015, the editors of the journal Lingua submitted a proposal to Elsevier, the for-profit publisher that operated the journal, to move Lingua to an open access model. They proposed that everyone should be able to read Lingua for free and that authors would retain copyright on their articles. Elsevier refused, so the entire editorial board of Lingua quit and started a new, open access journal called Glossa. Elsevier recruited a new editorial board and is still publishing Lingua, but it dropped from one of the top journals in linguistics to a marginal one. Meanwhile, Glossa has become very prestigious and popular, and is fully open access!
More recently, the editors of another journal, Syntax, are making a similar move. In 2024, Wiley Blackwell, the publisher of Syntax, eliminated the journal’s paid editorial staff and assigned all the tasks to a generalized team who aren’t trained in formatting linguistic data. As a result, the founding editor and several others have resigned and are in the process of founding a new open access journal named Syntactic Theory and Research.
The editorial board
Academic publishers will have editorial boards for their journals and for book series. It is the editorial board who arranges for peer review and ensures that the published work meets the standards of the scholarly field (and not just general publication standards). Editorial boards of academic publications should be made up of established academics with expertise in relevant fields, and will typically be professors at universities. Just like you can google the authors of papers, you can google the editorial boards to determine whether they are reputable scholars.
“Publish or perish” and predatory journals
Academia is very competitive, and there is a lot of pressure for early career academics to publish papers in order to get a job and then get promoted to a tenured position—especially since there are far more qualified candidates than positions available. As a result, a number of “predatory journals” have sprung up to exploit graduate students and other inexperienced academics. These predatory journals will often send recruitment emails inviting people to submit articles, with many of the same properties as other phishing emails.
Some signs of a predatory journal include:
- A very broad topic area, or publication of research articles outside of their stated topic area
- A very short review process (e.g., less than three months)
- A cost to the author to publish
- No editorial board or an editorial board that does not consist of established scholars
- Few in-text references (e.g., less than 2-3 per paragraph)
- Short bibliographies that cite mostly general resources
- Low quality content (e.g., presenting opinion as fact, lack of engagement with opposing views, methods are not described in enough detail to be replicated)
Key takeaways
- An academic source typically is written by an expert, presents original research, is peer reviewed, and includes extensive citation.
- The peer review process is when other experts on the topic read and critique a manuscript and give a recommendation to the editor for whether the manuscript should be published.
- To identify whether a source is academic, look for the following clues:
- The author has a university affiliation and is writing within their research specialty.
- The source is posted on a publisher’s website, rather than a website where authors share material directly.
- The publisher is an academic publisher or university press.
- The editorial board consists of established academics with relevant expertise.
Check yourself!
References and further resources
For a general audience
Dickson, EJ. 29 July 2014. How I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax about Amelia Bedelia. Daily Dot. https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-hoax/
Walkden, George. 9 March 2024. Editors of Syntax resign, found new journal. Open Access Linguistics. https://oaling.wordpress.com/2024/03/09/editors-of-syntax-resign-found-new-journal/
Wexler, Ellen. 5 November 2015. What a mass exodus at a linguistics journal means for scholarly publishing. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-a-mass-exodus-at-a-linguistics-journal-means-for-scholarly-publishing/
Research that involves the creation, discovery, or documentation of new knowledge and ideas.
A process where a piece of scholarship is reviewed by peers of the author. In the context of academic sources, the author and the author's peers would be expected to be experts on the topic.
