Popular Versus Scholarly Sources
While there are many different kinds of sources of information, we can broadly categorize many of them as either scholarly sources (also called academic sources) or popular sources.
Check out the differences between scholarly and popular sources (PDF) 
.
Popular Sources
- Written for a general audience — usually by journalists.
- Types of popular sources can include magazines, newspapers, books written for a general audience, and most websites.
- May be fact-checked for accuracy but not edited or reviewed by experts before publication.
- No References section and few in-text references.
- Often includes advertising, lots of pictures, and may look flashy and eye-catching.
Scholarly Sources
- Scholarly sources can also be called academic sources.
- Written for an academic audience by topic experts (usually professors or researchers).
- Types of scholarly sources include articles in academic journals, books published by an academic press and written by experts, some encyclopedias, etc.
- Contain in-text citations and have a References section.
- Have minimal or no advertising; look very plain.
- Many academic articles go through peer review during the publishing process. These articles can be called peer-reviewed sources.
Scholarly Sources: About Peer Review
"Peer Review in 3 Minutes" video courtesy of North Carolina State University Libraries.
Peer review is an editorial process where academic articles are read and commented on by other researchers (peers in the field) before the article is published in a journal. If the article doesn't meet academic or research standards or the reviewers catch other issues, the article is sent back to the author for revision or outright rejected. The author can revise and resubmit the article. The peer review process tries to ensure that only high quality work is published in academic journals.
Check out this overview of peer review from the publisher Elsevier.
Scholarly Sources: Primary Versus Secondary or Review Articles
Within scholarly sources, there is also a distinction between primary sources and secondary sources. Within the sciences, this is often the difference between original research and reviews.
See this comparison of primary and secondary sources from BMCC Library.
Primary Research
- Original research conducted by the authors. Can include experiments, clinical trials, or any other original research.
- Contains sections about methodology, results, and discussion.
Reviews/Secondary Sources
- Reviews and interprets someone else's original research.
- A secondary source can review a single primary source, or summarize multiple different studies--these are called meta-analysis, systematic reviews, literature reviews, or topic overviews depending on the type of summary.
- For the most part, it does not contain methodology, results, or discussion sections. Sometimes meta-analysis or systematic reviews contain these sections addressing how they performed the review itself.
Use these articles to complete the corresponding assignments in D2L.
Articles for the Biological Literature in-class assignment:
Articles for the Brine Shrimp Source Evaluation in-class assignment:
Journal articles in the health and life sciences. Science (AAAS)
Online version of the journal Science published by the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science).
Science (Gale OneFile)
Articles from scholarly science journals and science and industry magazines. MEDLINE/PubMed
PubMed contains citations to articles in MEDLINE and other sources. Selected full text articles available. Click the Find Full Text button with the Normandale logo to see if the full text of the article is available in another database.
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Consider the source's –
A = Author
P = Publication
P = Point of View
S = Sources
The online version of the science writing and citation guide, published by the Council of Science Editors (CSE). See Part 4 Chapter 29 for information on how to cite your sources.