Gauging the quality of information and interpretation:
What counts as a “scholarly source”?

When/how to use Wikipedia, google, and other internet sources. All of us have “googled” a phrase or checked the Wikipedia entry to get information quickly—myself included. However, you should always consider this information provisional and tentative, until it is substantiated by a reliable source.

Scholarly publishing, unlike digital publishing, involves extensive review by people with credentials in the field before the material is allowed to go to print. University libraries try to acquire only “vetted” materials, so in general, something you get in hard copy at McHenry is significantly more trustworthy than a page you reached by googling. (Many professors, including me, maintain course webpages for teaching purposes, but the information we present there is often very general and digested from lectures: treat these, too, as on the same level as the Britannica.)

Don’t take me for an elitist here: wikis are amazing tools with great egalitarian potential. But Wikipedia does contain errors of fact; every professor has stories about these. And there’s another reason to read Wikipedia entries on literature, history, and art with a very skeptical eye: many of the interpretations of literary works and figures you’ll find on Wikipedia are bland, mainstream ones that essentially recycle received ideas you could just as easily get from the Encyclopedia Britannica (for instance, their entry on Carpentier says nothing about lo real maravilloso and fails to give the Spanish title of The Lost Steps—and its major source is the Britannica!). One niche Wikipedia does fill brilliantly is on popular culture’s appropriations of literary material.

*A reliable source is not the same as a scholarly source. Wikipedia contains lots of accurate facts, just like any encyclopedia. But this doesn’t mean either is the best source for your research. Encyclopedia entries tend to give facts along with a consensus interpretation of why these facts matter; they don’t usually give a sense of critical controversies. This is what you need to engage as you move to a more sophisticated level of scholarly sources: to see where the controversies are, to see what highly informed readers argue about, and to position yourself to be part of this ongoing dialogue.

YOUR 2 SCHOLARLY SOURCES, THEN, SHOULD NOT INCLUDE ENCYCLOPEDIAS OR GENERAL REFERENCE WORKS, BUT SHOULD COME FROM REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES, BOOKS, OR BOOKS OF ESSAYS.

Critical writing on literature that gets heard in the ongoing scholarly conversation tends to appear either in articles in refereed journals; in essay collections published by academic presses; or (more extensively) in books. A “refereed” journal is one that sends the essays it receives out for review by established scholars in the field before publishing them (this would exclude, for instance, student journals, newsletters, popular magazines, etc.). Any journal that McHenry carries, or makes available through its electronic databases, will be one of these.

Databases like JSTOR, which make available fully text-searchable versions of many leading scholarly journals, are amazing tools that can make your research work much easier. You need to use these on a UC computer (since access has to be paid for by the institution), or set up your home computer for access through the main library page or at the McHenry electronic resources page. One place to search first is the MLA Bibliography (click “M” on that list), which indexes nearly every journal of literary scholarship, including some really obscure ones you won’t be able to find here (if so, don’t worry about it—or ask one of us if it’s worth bothering to ask Interlibrary Loan for it). An MLA Bibliography search will turn up a screen of “hits” that you can save; it will also have hyperlinks to any articles (and a few books!) available online through UCSC’s paid access subscriptions. When you click these links, they will then allow you to download a PDF and read or print the article immediately. (You can also go to the McHenry stacks, find the journal, and copy it manually.)

For the better-known writers on the syllabus, and for the critical essays, you may also search CRUZCAT for relevant monographs (monograph=a book written by one scholar) or edited collections of essays by various scholars. Taking the call number of one source and searching the adjacent shelves can also be illuminating.

If you choose to write on Urrea or Boullosa, your sources are likely to be more limited as these works were published more recently. (There is a fairly good amount of scholarship on Julia Alvarez’s works.) In this case, you might want to consider a reception study, in which you consider the responses of reviewers at the point the books were published. You could also search for published interviews with the authors.

If you are interested in delving deeper into the historical context of a given work, the same general rules apply in gauging the scholarly quality of the work of historians. The MLA Bibliography won’t be your best source; look in other electronic databases for history articles, or search CRUZCAT for books.

With all these scholarly sources--journal articles, essay collections, and books--be aware of the date of publication. There are some brilliant scholarly readings from the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1970s, but be aware that they will be proceeding from a different set of understandings about the nature of interpretation than we might have today. You’ll get a better sense of the current state of the conversation about something if you stick with material published in the 1980s and afterward (ideally, after 1990).

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