Library:Research Skills For Engineering Students/Module 02/Page 03
Sources such as magazines, news stories, and blogs are known as popular sources. These aim to inform the general public, and are more informal in tone and scope.
Popular sources can be useful when looking for background or current information on a topic, although they aren’t generally considered scholarly.
There are many different types of popular sources, but in general, these sources:
- Are not written by subject experts
- Are written for the general public
- Have no or limited citations and references to their source information
- Include advertisements and graphics
Some examples of popular engineering sources include:
- IEEE Spectrum, a trade magazine
- The Globe and Mail, a newspaper
- Gizmodo, a blog
On the other hand, scholarly sources are written by experts in a particular field, with the expectation the audience has a certain level of pre-understanding. They can include journal articles, conference proceedings, theses/dissertations, and others.
In general, these sources:
- Are written by subject experts
- Are written for experts (researchers, post-secondary students, and so on)
- Have extensive citations and references to their source information
- Include figures, tables, charts, or graphs that generally focus on results
To see the typical components of a scholarly journal article, check out Anatomy of a Scholarly Article from North Carolina State University Libraries.