The table below shows which characteristics are more commonly associated with scholarly or popular sources. Both scholarly and popular sources can be appropriate for your research purposes, depending on your research topic/question and your assignment parameters.
| Scholarly | Popular | |
|---|---|---|
| Authors: | Experts such as scientists, faculty, practitioners, and historians | Usually generalists, including bloggers, staff writers, and journalists; not always attributed |
| Examples: | Surveillance & Society; Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism; books from University presses such as Oxford University Press and the MIT Press | Boston Globe; New York Times; Wikipedia; CNN.com; Time Magazine; bestselling books; books from popular/trade publishers like Penguin Random House or Hachette |
| Focus: | Usually specific and in-depth | Often broad overviews or opposing viewpoints |
| Language: | Dense; includes academic jargon | Easier to read; defines specialized terms |
| Citations: | Include bibliographies, citations, and footnotes that follow a particular academic style guide | No formal citations included; may or may not informally attribute sources in text |
| Pre-publication: | Very often evaluated by peers/other scholars (peer-reviewed or peer-refereed) | Edited by in-house editors or not edited at all |
| Audience: | Specialists in the subject area: students, professors and the author's peers | General readers; usually doesn't require any special background |
| Purpose: | Communicating research findings; education | Inform, entertain; provide news/updates |
Grey Literature refers to reports, conference proceedings, preprints, working papers, theses, dissertations, personal communications, technical notes" and other ephemeral scientific sources, often published by government, business or academic organizations. This kind of literature can be key for emerging research and alternative perspectives.
Government Publications are a subset of grey literature, and can be important sources for state, federal, and international perspectives on official government proceedings of all kinds.
Tertiary Sources refer to encyclopedias, dictionaries, textbooks and other reference materials that provide broad overviews of particular topics. Where secondary sources summarize and interpret an event or phenomenon, tertiary sources summarize and interpret other resources. They can be a great place to begin studying unfamiliar topics.
Trade Literature refers to journals, websites, newsletters and other sources aimed at professionals in a particular field. These sources will often report news and trends in the field, reviews of products related to the industry at hand, interviews with leaders in the field, as well as job listings and advertisements.
Looking for more newspaper articles? Use the box below to search Google News for articles from thousands of newspapers worldwide.
You may already be familiar with searching in Google to find just about any kind of information you could want. Be judicious about the sources you find through Google, especially if you might use them for an assignment. To help you find quality grey source websites you can use a top-level domain search to specify what kind of sites you want Google to target in your results.
For example:
If you’re trying to evaluate a website, keep these ABCs in mind as you review your sources for quality:
Authority - Is the website's author listed along with his/her credentials? Usually a URL with .edu, .org or.gov is more reliable than.com and .net
Bias - Is the website objective, presenting both sides of an issue? Or, is the information presented to sway the audience to a particular point of view? Who is the audience? A certain political group, adults, children, researchers? Depending on your purpose for using the website, the intended audience needs to be taken into consideration.
Currency - Is the website current, providing the 'created' date and 'last updated' information?
Note: One or more of the ABCs may be more important in evaluating a website, depending on the information you need. For example, medical and scientific information usually needs to be current. If you are trying to take a stand on an issue, a biased database may be acceptable as long as it is coming from a reliable source (authority).
Fact Checking Websites (video)
