Before publishing the manuscript is peer reviewed. Peer-reviewed journals are publications that include only those articles that have been reviewed and/or qualified by a selected panel of acknowledged experts in the field of study covered by the journal. In Ebsco and ProQuest databases you can limit search results to articles from peer-reviewed journals.
A good starting point for evaluating an article is the amount of citations it has received. Citations can be retrieved from the following databases:
The impact of academic publications is typically measured by how much it is read, used and cited. Books can also be evaluated by author background information and prestigiousness of the publisher. Other ways of evaluating books are through book reviews and sales figures from publishers. Book reviews can be found in ProQuest and Ebsco databases, Web of Science, JSTOR and in Finnish databases Arto and Aleksi.
Evaluation of the reliability of the sources is an important element in scientific research. The idea is to establish the reliability of the source of the information and the information itself, and to consider their value as source material.