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Student Resources

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Types of Resources

Types of sources and where to find them

Information Need	Sources	Where to go
Background	Books Encyclopedias	Library catalog
Current	Newspapers Magazines Trade Journals Scholarly Journals	Library databases Google Scholar Websites
Research	Scholarly Journals	Library databases Google Scholar
Statistics	Government Documents Scholarly Journals Industry Reports	Websites Library databases

Popular vs. Trade vs. Scholarly

	Popular	Trade	Scholarly
Appearance	Glossy pages, lots of ads, illustrations	Glossy pages, illustrations, ads targeted to specific industry interests	Plain cover and paper, black and white graphics (rarely color), few to no ads
Audience	General public	Professionals, members of a particular industry	Researchers, professionals, educators
Content	News, general interest, personalities, entertainment	Industry trends and news, advice and techniques	Research studies, methodologies, theories, literature reviews
Authority	Articles written by staff writers, rarely in-depth, few to no references	Articles written by staff and freelance authors; few to no references	Articles written by researchers and field experts. Bibliographies contain extensive, scholarly references
Accountability	Editorial review	Editorial review	Peer-reviewed/refereed by other experts in the field
Example covers
Example articles	"Ditch dieting, get healthy" - Shape	"Obesity Therapy: Reason for dieting affects dieting behavior" - Obesity, Fitness & Wellness Week	"Environmental and genetic pathways between early pubertal timing and dieting in adolescence: distinguishing between objective and subjective timing" - Psychological Medicine

Web Resources

	.Gov	.Com/ .Net	.Org	.Edu
Purpose	Inform citizens about legislation and regulations	Sales Persuade	Non-profit Persuade Inform Advocate	Serve an educational community
Information type	Laws Regulations Statistics	Broad Opinionated Persuasive Commercial	Hobbies Politics Fundraising Blogs	PreK-12 Academic Marketing Research Services
Use or not?	SOMETIMES Government agencies (FDA, CDC, health departments, etc.) can be primary sources for data, comprehensive reports, regulations, etc. Be careful to avoid political agenda pages. The government also has its own message to control and is subject to bias, too.	RARELY The rare exception may be newspapers or if you need to cite factual information from a company’s website (size, revenue, purpose, etc.), but bias is huge, so be alert! Newspapers are businesses, but they can give you inspiration for a topic, alert you to a new study released (look past the headline to the actual study), and take society’s “temperature.” Newspapers & magazines will contain “shallow,” fast information and bias may be present.	SOMETIMES Anyone can create an .org website. If your site is a research organization, can you trace their funding and affiliates? Is this a pro-GMO site funded by Monsanto? Are they citing scholarly sources that you can access yourself? Is the language factual or persuasive? What is their purpose? Who are the authors?	SOMETIMES Some universities publish research in digital repositories. These may be published by their own journals or include gray literature (pre-publication, research data, in-progress research). They also contain student papers. Do NOT student papers. Only use articles that have clearly been published in a journal (indicated in header, footer, or bibliographic record). If an article is marked “pre-publication,” try to find the actual journal publication.

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