8 Scholarly Books
Scholarly Books Overview
Scholarly books are written by academic experts and cover niche topics on an in-depth, scholarly level. They consolidate, explain, and evaluate previous research in their field primarily for an audience of other researchers or professionals. Students or the general public may also find these books useful for deeper reading on a topic of interest.
Organization of Scholarly Books
Unlike popular books, scholarly books often do not follow a single narrative from start to finish. Instead, many are a collection of essays related to a larger theme. Although one or more editors oversee the entire work, each chapter may have different authors and their own reference lists. Even books with a single author may include chapters on different topics that don’t need to be read front to back.
This structure means that (with some exceptions) you do not have to read the entire book to get helpful information. You may find that 1-2 chapters are useful, while the others are irrelevant to your project.
Search tip: Browse a book’s Table of Contents to help you decide whether any individual chapters are relevant to your research topic. It is common to read and cite a single chapter from a scholarly book in your reference list.
For example, here’s the Table of Contents for Dr. Sami Schalk’s 2022 book Black Disability Politics:
If you are working on an assignment for a psychology class, you may focus on Chapter 2: “Fighting Psychiatric Abuse.” For a political science project, you may want Chapter 1: “We Have a Right to Rebel.”
Activity: Skim a Scholarly Book
The library has many examples of scholarly books both in print and digitally. Since we have not yet learned how to search the library site, here are some examples that are available open access. Choose one and quickly browse the Table of Contents plus 1-2 chapters. You can read in depth if you like, but the goal here is to get familiar with the overall organization, style, and scope.
- Bandits in Print: “The Water Margin” and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel, Scott W. Gregory (2023)
- Synthetic Frontiers: Ocean Plastic and the Persistence of Trash Islands, Kim de Wolff (2020)
- How the World Changed Social Media, Daniel Miller et al. (2016)
Additional Notes
- Textbooks do not count as scholarly books. Textbooks communicate well-known information in a field that typically does not need to be cited unless you are quoting directly. Additionally, their primary audience is students rather than other scholars. Keep in mind that not every book assigned for class reading is a textbook.
- Check with your professor if you are not sure whether a book you’re assigned to read for class is a traditional textbook or another scholarly work. They can help you determine whether the information in the book can be cited for an assignment.
- Myths about print books:
- Myth 1: print books are out of date. Academic libraries still purchase plenty of new books in print for a variety of reasons. The percentage of books available in print vs. online may vary by institution, but if you discount print resources, you may be missing out on valuable information. Also, older ideas and information are not automatically less useful (depending on your field of study and research topic).
- Myth 2: book sources will take too long to read. First, we encourage choosing sources based on their relevancy to your topic, not how quickly you can read them. Second, as we explain above, it is common to cite just one relevant chapter from a longer work. Many book chapters are not meaningfully different in length than a journal article.
