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Information Produced by Academic Institutions Universities and colleges are also major producers of knowledge. Faculty perform research in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. This research is called scholarly. The results of this research can sometimes be applied directly to practical and social problems. It sometimes benefits companies or public institutions. Much of the research and knowledge produced by scholars is used by other scholars to advance the state of knowledge in a specific field of study. Research and knowledge generated by faculty at universities and colleges is most often published in the form of books and scholarly journals. You can locate this knowledge by searching library catalogs and scholarly journal indexes. How to locate scholarly sources will be addressed in Lesson 4. To be published in a scholarly journal or book, researchers submit their findings to a publication's peer review board. Faculty researchers try to match the content and style of their research to a particular journal's focus and audience. The article or book is then evaluated by a panel of experts in the field for the merit of its ideas, originality, thoroughness in research, accuracy, and contribution to the body of knowledge in the discipline. The peer review board then makes a recommendation to accept or reject the work for publication. Often the peer review board makes suggestions for revisions or further clarification that may require rewriting and additional research. The publication of an article or book encourages other scholars to further explore the research to corroborate or dispute it. This exchange and debate of ideas and findings contributes to the production of the larger body of knowledge within a discipline. The way academic disciplines structure knowledge affects searching. If you wish to effectively locate information you must have some idea of how academic disciplines and libraries structure knowledge. We will discuss these structures more in Lesson 2.
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