 As students, it's important for us to think critically about the information we encounter. Learning to evaluate books helps us understand and make better use of such information. Briefly, let's think about how to evaluate the books we find in terms of three useful categories, scholarly, popular, and authoritative. For a quick overview of what we mean by these three terms, check out the Beam Library's video, Focused Beam, Searching for Scholarly. They say you can't judge a book by its cover, and that's good advice, but you can usually judge a book by what's just under its front cover, the title page. A first step in evaluating a book is to look at the title page. This page typically contains the title, author, and publisher, and its reverse side usually offers publication information, including the date of copyright. One of the first questions to ask when evaluating a book is, who is the publisher? If the publisher is a university press, the book can likely be considered scholarly. Or if the publisher is well-known for offering high-level academic works, such as Brill or Rootledge, it's likely a scholarly book. And if you're in doubt, names of academic publishers can be easily located simply by googling List of Academic Publishers. If the book is published by a commercial publisher, like Zonderven, for example, or if it's self-published, it likely shouldn't be considered scholarly. But keep in mind that a popular level work may be authoritative, when in doubt, check with your professor to see if a source is appropriate for your particular project. Next, we need to think about the author. Is this person well-known as a scholar in his or her field? You may be uncertain. Again, googling an author's name is a good way to find out if she's associated with a particular university or if he is known as a scholar and expert in his field. But be careful. Even if an author is known as a scholar, the book itself may be popular in nature. That's why it's important to also consider the book's intended audience. So we need to ask, for whom is this book written? Is it written for the scholarly community, loaded with technical language and insider talk, or is it written to be read and understood by a more popular audience? Often, a well-known scholar like N.T. Wright, for example, will offer books intended for a popular audience. In such cases, these books are not considered scholarly, but they are certainly authoritative. Again, it's a good idea to check with your professor to confirm whether or not a book you've found is appropriate for your project. Two final elements for evaluating a book's scholarship and usefulness remain, timeliness and documentation. Timeliness can be a frustrating concept. In the sciences, students are typically required to engage only the most recent works on their topic. In terms of books, this would be items published within the last five years or so. But in the humanities, timeliness is different. Older works are often considered relevant and included in scholarly conversation. But even in the humanities, it's important to engage recent scholarship so that you better hear how new insights have informed and shaped current conversation. So check out the reverse side of the title page and look for the date of copyright. Note that some books are revised over time and republished. Other books are simply reprinted. It takes a bit of critical thinking and perhaps some digging, but try to determine if the book you found still offers current, relevant information. And finally, documentation offers a pretty good indication of a book's scholarship. Does the book have extensive end notes or footnotes? Does it provide a bibliography of other high-level resources to which readers can refer for further study? A book that does not offer robust documentation of sources is likely not scholarly. Such a book may be authoritative, but it's probably written with a popular audience in mind. And again, popular-level books can still be authoritative, so check with your professor to confirm that a book you found is appropriate for your specific project. And remember that your beam librarians are here to help. If you have a question about the scholarly nature of a book, feel free to ask a librarian. We look forward to assisting you as you learn to better evaluate the information you encounter.