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Politics and Government

This guide is meant to point researchers in the direction of commonly-used politics & government resources available at Illinois State University. There are also descriptions of general search strategies to use those resources.

What's on this Page

The boxes below describe different aspects of an article to address when deciding whether or not to use them for different research projects. The first box describes techniques to determine whether something is scholarly or not. Many assignments require scholarly you use scholarly articles and this will help you find them. The second box describes how to determine if a scholarly article is empirical, another common requirement. The last box will help you determine credibility and relevance of each article. If you need more assistance, please contact me using the information in my profile or Milner's Ask a Librarian.

what does Scholarly mean?

Scholarly = Peer Review. What is 'Peer Review'?

This work by North Carolina State University Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The original video can be found at the NC State Library site.


How do I know something is peer reviewed?

Most Milner databases will include a box to check that will limit search results to just peer reviewed articles. This takes much of the guesswork out of it.

close up of scholarly filter button

However, if you need to determine if an article is peer reviewed, just go to the journal's webpage. If a journal participates in peer review, they will make it very clear on the Home or About pages. They will even list the members of the editorial board.


if you need more help identifying different types of articles, Milner has a guide that goes into more detail. if you need more help identifying different types of articles, Milner has a guide that goes into more detail.

Evaluating Sources

The above video was created by NCSU Libraries.

The above video was created by NCSU Libraries.