Information Literacy

What are the characteristics of a scholarly publication in the digital age?

Web publishing has complicated the identification of scholarly communications. Traditional cues such as publisher, press, and durability are no longer constant in the world of digital, scholarly communications. Findings from Leah Halliday’s work with scholars, librarians, and researchers has identified three characteristics:

Trustworthiness

• Scholarly Publications, such as articles and books, should not be changed after digital distribution.  
• Different versions should be clearly identified so as to alert the community to changes.
• To satisfy all potential interest, trustworthiness should be based on 'institutionalised' measures such as peer review and this process should be evident to the community.
• Each publication should have at least one identifiable author.

Publicity

• The potential audience must be made aware that the publication exists. Libraries are great partners for publicity.
• The publication should have metadata containing a minimum set of information, preferably including information about all versions. Metadata will enable others to find it.

Accessibility

• The author must intend that the publication be made publicly available in a durable form over the long term.
• The publication must be durably recorded on some medium.
• The publication must be reliably accessible and retrievable over time. Supporting institutions have a responsibility to support long-term accessibility.
• There should be a commitment not to withdraw the publication by the author(s).
• The publication must be publicly available, i.e. available to any member of the public on demand as of right, whether for payment of a fee or not.
• The publication should have stable identifiers.

Works Cited

Halliday, L. (2001). Scholarly communication, scholarly publication and the status of emerging formats.Information Research, 6(4). Retrieved from: Available at: http://InformationR.net/ir/paper111.html

• Abstract: A brief summary of an article. The abstract for a scholarly article will summarize the authors' research purpose, methods, and conclusions.
• Database: A collection of information, usually electronic. Usually refers to a place you can search for articles in journals and magazines. Databases index (or organize) articles, so that they are online and searchable. An example of a UWM database would be: Academic Search Complete.
• Interlibrary Loan (ILL): A library service that allows you to request books and articles we do not own at UWM.
• Peer Review (Refereed): Articles published in peer reviewed journals have been reviewed and edited by a board of expert editors.
• Scholarly Source: Scholarly sources are different from news sources because rather than reporting an event, scholarly sources ask and answer questions through some form of analysis. Scholarly sources are written by experts-- people who know a lot about their subject like professors-- and they also refer to other sources in a works cited/references list to show where their information came from originally.
• Open Access: Scholarly publications that can be freely accessed by the general public online.

This guide is based on the Information Literacy Tutorial from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Information Literacy Tutorial by Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. Based on a work at https://guides.library.uwm.edu/infolit.

Thank you to UW-Milwaukee Golda Meir Library for content and inspiration.