Your instructor probably said that you need to focus your research using "scholarly journals" and other academic resources from the library. That means that you cannot randomly search online, scrolling through webpages, blogs or Wikipedia for research. So, what does "scholarly” and “academic” mean when it comes to research?
Scholarly journals are published by universities, societies, or associations of specialized fields. Articles are written by scholars in that field who present the results of original research and experimentation or provide technical or professional information. They go through a peer-review evaluation process before being published. Peer-reviewed articles are reviewed by other scholars in the same field who provide feedback about the article's quality, accuracy, relevance to scholarship in the field, validity of research methodology and procedures, and more.
Often, you can find some wonderful examples and stories, related to your topic in mainstream magazines. While you shouldn't rely on sources like these exclusively, they might be useful to you occasionally. Here are some of their main characteristics:
The following is a list of the library databases that are good resources for scholarly journal articles:
