The criteria on this page should be used together to determine if a book is scholarly and to evaluate whether it's appropriate for your purposes. Most of the information needed to assess a book on the basis of these criteria can be found in the book's front matter (i.e., title page, publication info, table of contents, preface/foreword).
Book reviews can also be helpful in evaluating a book's scholarly level. See a list of resources for finding book reviews at the bottom of the page.
Words used in the title can often give you clues about a book's intended audience or purpose. Scholarly book's usually have titles that sound more formal. For example, books with titles like Complexity and Evolution: Toward a New Synthesis for Economics have a much greater likelihood of being scholarly as compared to books with titles like Business Cat: Money, Power, Treats.
Timeliness and currency are important when selecting a book for your research. Whether or not a book is considered current will vary greatly depending on the discipline and the particular topic. Additionally, since it can take years to write and publish a book, if you're looking for the most up-to-date information available, you may need to consult other types of sources that have a faster publication cycle.
Authors of scholarly books cite their sources using formal citation styles like APA, MLA, Chicago, or others. These references may appear as parenthetical citations, footnotes, endnotes, or bibliographies. When evaluating the quality of a scholarly book, it's often useful to examine these citations to get a better sense of the relationship between the book and other scholarly work on the topic.
The text of scholarly books will usually have a more serious tone and use formal or technical language that may not be easily understood by a general audience.
Scholarly books are almost always written by professors or researchers affiliated with universities or research institutes. Some scholarly books, often called edited books or edited volumes, are co-authored by a group of people who are each responsible for a particular chapter. The editors of edited volumes are also professors or researchers.
Most scholarly books list their authors' and/or editors' credentials (i.e., affiliations with universities or research institutes, previous publications, and sometimes academic degrees). This information can be useful in determining whether someone is considered an authority on the topic they're writing about.
There are several different categories of publishers, each specializing in particular types of book. A quick Google search can tell you which of the following categories a publisher belongs to:
Scholarly books, e.g. Harvard University Press
Professional, technical, reference, textbooks, e.g. Wiley, Scholastic
Scholarly (often reporting research produced by members of the center or institute), e.g. Pew Research Center; Brookings Institution Press
Popular/mass-marketed, e.g. Random House, Penguin
Scholarly, Textbooks, e.g. Muse Open, National Academies Press
Reviews of scholarly books are often published in scholarly journals. If the book you're evaluating has been reviewed, it can be helpful to consult the review to get a better sense of how the book is perceived by other scholars doing research in the same subject area. You can find book reviews in many library databases:
Contains citations to reviews of books from different disciplines, some with full text. Coverage from 1975-present. Limit Document Type to Book Review.
Peer-reviewed, full-text journals, magazines, periodicals, reports, books and videos meets the needs of scholars in every discipline ranging from astronomy, anthropology, biomedicine, engineering, health, mathematics, pharmacology, women’s studies, zoology and more.
This is an archival collection so the most recent few years are not included. Use Advanced Search, then check Review under the Narrow Your Search To area.
JSTOR has a "moving wall," which represents the time period between the last issue available in JSTOR and the most recently published issue of a journal. Publishers determine the moving wall length in their license agreements with JSTOR. Moving walls may range from zero to ten years, and those with walls from zero to seven years participate in our revenue sharing program. In calculating the moving wall, the current, incomplete year is not counted.
Includes full-text access to thousands of news sources in the U.S. and abroad back to the 1970s; articles and data on businesses, corporations, industries and markets in the U.S. and abroad; magazines and trade journals; biographical information and special directories; legal documents, including U.S. Federal and State court cases, and law reviews from the late 18th century to present.
Full text of selected reviews and articles.
Includes national papers such as the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal. Also local and regional papers including the Binghamton Press and Sun Bulletin, the Ithaca Journal, and other Gannettt publications. Coverage: 1980 - current
Replaces Newstand and Gannett Newstream.Humanities, social sciences, and mathematics journals from several university presses. Coverage from 1990-present. Use Advanced Search and limit By Type to Review.
Coverage: Varies by title; earliest from 1990.Full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue. For more recent coverage, use our Journal Title search.
Presents in-depth reviews of over thirty of the newest books in American history each issue. Published quarterly by Johns Hopkins University Press. Coverage March 1995-present.
The database indexes 1,700 journals from 1964 to present and also includes citations and links to book and media reviews. Strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including abstracts in English of articles published in more than 40 languages.
