Evaluation of Scholarly Sources

Impacts of Social Media on Society

Gerd Altmann "Social Media" via Pixabay
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In this post, I am analyzing two scholarly sources that address the issue of how social media impacts society. By evaluating these sources, I will affirm that each source is credible and useful for my research.

Computers in Human Behavior Journal 

Article

Purpose

This article takes the reader through a study to investigate the role that social media plays in a cross-national context. It seeks to add to the discussion about what social media does to and for societies.

Publishing

This journal uses a "peer review" process for the submission and publishing of articles. It is published through Elsevier, and is one of the Top Journals in eSociety that I mentioned in My Field of Study. 

Cited Sources

This article references articles of other journals, books, and other studies conducted - all of which were relevant. It makes use of in-text citations, footnotes, and a bibliography. They occasionally used quotes, but mainly paraphrase or reference another text briefly without quotations.

Authors

Hsuan-Ting Chen, Sun Ping, and Gan Chen are all faculty at the School of Journalism and Communication in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. They all have Ph.D.s and have carried out extensive research in the field. They have participated at conferences, and have written multiple books and articles.

Audience

Students, faculty, or high-level readers that have some knowledge of communication and social sciences.

Database

I found this journal article in Elsevier, a database that publishes a wide range of scholarly journals.

Journal of Human Behavior in the Social  Environment 

Article

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to understand why people spend the way they do online in relation to consumer type, social media, and branding.

Publishing

This journal uses a "peer review" process for the submission and publishing of articles. The journal itself is published by Taylor & Francis (Routledge).

Cited Sources
They mostly reference journal articles that relate to marketing and consumer tendencies. They also cite a few books on the relationship between social media and marketing strategy. Like the other scholarly article, they rarely use quotes, but have a plethora of citations and references to sources in the text.

Authors

Joydip Dhar and Abhishek Kumar both have Ph.D.s. It's difficult to verify any other experience they have in the field.

Audience
Students, faculty, or high-level readers that have some knowledge of communication and social sciences and an interest in marketing are the target audience of this article.

Database

I found this article by searching in Academic Search Complete, which can be found at the UA Library Page.

Conclusion

Both  sources can be identified as credible scholarly sources due to the resources they cite, the databases in which they are made available, their publishing process, their purpose, and their audience. The only difference in credibility is the ability to verify authors. In the first article, it was relatively easy to identify the authors of the article on other resources, but for the second article, the most I could definitively confirm was that each author had a Ph.D. Even though the second source is slightly less credible, it has all other characteristics of a credible scholarly journal article.