Just because it's published in an academic journal does not mean that it's Correct, or that it's good. Plenty of articles are pushed over the hill to publication because they're zeitgeisty. Academia has trends just like everything else, and sometimes those trends end up being anywhere from a little misguided to very stupid.
2. Even a great, well-researched, well-cited book/article can have material in it that is wrong, or it can end with a batshit interpretation of data. I think the funniest example of this I've read recently is the book Man Corn, which painstakingly goes through almost every single instance of potential cannibalism in archaeological remains from the Precolumbian American Southwest and then makes the specific conclusion that a culture of highly socially regimented, aggressively warlike cannibalistic freaks kept cyclically rising in central Mexico for thousands of years and being chased out to invade Chaco Canyon, which they controlled socially via frequent displays of ritual cannibalism. That is a...colorful conclusion to make, but the data in the book is still very good and useful!
3. Possible you're going to be reading one language through another, especially when it comes to ancient languages. Academic translation is a difficult art. The nuance or context present in the original Hungarian or French or Sumerian might not come across all the way. Scholars working with difficult or fragmentary older languages might have wildly different interpretations about the meaning of a single world, let alone a text. Many ancient and medieval texts are extremely difficult to translate "correctly" because the script, systems of abbreviation, and references are obscure, or because half the codex was eaten by rats. Sarcasm and humor are genuinely quite hard to parse across time and scholars are going to have different opinions on how to deal with a source. Nothing Is Certain
4. You are never going to get a work of "pure," "correct" history because that's not how unconscious cultural biases work. National traditions of scholarship might favor one view over another. For example: Gísli Sigurðsson, an Icelandic gentleman who grew up with these stories as part of the national fabric, thinks that the Prose Edda demonstrates that Snorri Sturluson was a reluctant or ambivalent Christian, maybe even a crypto-pagan. Heinrich Beck, a German academic who grew up aware that the perceived pagan bona fides of the Prose Edda were used for horrific purposes, argues that the Prose Edda is a very learned Christian work that is fluent in Christian theology and organized to be an analogue for Biblical material. I have my own opinions on which of these scholars are correct, but they are both serious academics who have spent decades working with material to support these theories. It's just very clear why they became interested in which side of the argument in the first place. (Gísli in fact says this out loud in the introduction to The Medieval Icelandic saga and Oral Tradition, that he was surprised that when he went to university outside Iceland no one wanted to entertain the importance of longrunning oral tradition in the sagas, as in Iceland it's kind of a given). Mild cultural biases are inescapable parts of writing history, they are not dealbreakers.
5. History and folkloristics and literature are different things. Except when they're not. When are they not? Incredibly dependent on period and location. Did this really happen or is it a metaphor? Did it happen at that speed? Elder Scrolls reference: Ysgramor was supposed to have come back to Tamriel from Atmora after the Snow Elves massacred the Atmoran Nords at Saarthal on Night of Tears, accompanied by his Five Hundred Companions, and then they destroyed the Snow Elves and won Skyrim for the Nords. However, the books scattered around Skyrim/Michael Kirkbride say that the Atmoran conquest of Skyrim took hundreds of years and that the Five Hundred Companions were probably a certain number of chieftains or warlords who brought their own troops along with them. Historians have different levels of credulity about equivalent incidents in the record. Did Harun al-Rashid send Charlemagne an elephant as tribute, as Einhard reports, or did he just make allowance for ivory trade into the Carolingian Empire? Was the raid on Lindisfarne that destructive when it was clearly still operational afterwards? Was it a slave raid or a hostage situation given that Alcuin hints that he can probably retrieve the kidnapped novices? Did Hjalti Skeggjason really get in trouble for calling Freyja a bitch at Alþing in 999 or at that point was Iceland so thoroughly syncretized towards Christianity that he wouldn't have needed to make that comment in the first place? &c
6. If you're researching to write a novel, then you are in fact allowed to do whatever. Harry Turtledove had a leg up on writing Justinian because he has a PhD in Byzantine history, but in the back of the book he blithely says that he juggled timelines and characters for a better story. Bernard Cornwell has a Notes at the back of every book where he describes what he intentionally left out because he didn't think it was cool or sexy or plot-friendly enough. Don't worry about it.
7. Academics can sometimes be incredibly bitchy towards each other in their published work. Unlike being bitchy about a random historical figure, this is fine, and is in fact delightful to read over a cascading series of response articles
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