Guide to Popular, Trade and Scholarly Sources
Overview
Many of the assignments for your courses may ask you to use specific sources or types of sources such as popular magazine articles or scholarly or professional journal articles. There are some basic ways that you can identify these types of periodicals.
| Popular Magazines |
Trade Journals |
Scholarly Journals |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Examples | The Economist, Psychology Today, Time, National Geographic | Advertising Age, The CPA Journal, Billboard, American Libraries | Journal of the History of Ideas, College English, Antiquity, Science |
| Audience | For the general public; use language understood by the average reader | For those in a particular trade or industry | For students, scholars, researchers; uses specialized vocabulary of the discipline |
| Content | May report research as news items,feature stories, editorials and opinion pieces | Reports on problems or issues in a particular industry | Reports original research, theory; may include an abstract |
| Appearance | Highly visual, a lot of advertising, color, photos, short articles with no bibliographies or references | Visual, contains advertising, color, photos, | Little or no advertising, has tables & charts, high concentration of print, lengthy articles, bibliographies & references |
| Authors | Author may not be named, frequently a staff writer, not a subject expert | Staff writers, freelance authors | Authors are specialists, articles are signed, & credentials such as degrees, university affiliation are often given. |