Post 2) Scholarly vs. Popular Sources
Your
professor only wants you to use "scholarly journals" for your
research paper. What does that mean?
If this is
the first time you're hearing the term "scholarly journal," that's
okay. Most of us don't sit around
reading journals for fun. But now that
you're starting your academic career, you'll begin to see how important these
journals are. It's through scholarly
journals that experts in a field
share new research and new ideas. So while you may read a great story about
ground breaking research in a newspaper or magazine, chances are that those
researchers published their original results in an academic, or scholarly,
journal. That's what makes these
journals so important to your research.
You can go right to the source without anyone else's opinions getting in
the way.
This is not
to say that newspapers and magazines, or so-called "popular sources,"
cannot be helpful to your research.
Newspapers can give you precise details about a particular event as well
as how people reacted to that event around the time that it occurred. Magazines can offer interesting and varying
viewpoints on a single topic. But be careful how you use these sources. And
you’ll want to steer clear of them all together if that’s what your professor
has instructed.
So how can you tell the difference between a “popular”
source and a “scholarly” source? Take a look at the NOVA Libraries guide How to Find and Identify Peer Reviewed
Journals (http://nova.libguides.com/peer-reviewed).
Wait…What is “peer review?” That will be the topic of next
week’s post. Happy reading!
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