The Trio: All sources are not created equal!
SCHOLARLY > SUBSTANTIVE > TERTIARY
Most popular forms:
Scholarly journals and
scholarly books
Most popular form:
Long-form journalism piece
Most popular form:
YouTube video
Written by: expert(s) in the
field
Written by: staff members
Audience: Other experts in
the field
Purpose: Educate about a
topic/communicate results of
an experiment
Not colorful, no pictures; has
a low text-to-picture ratio
Audience: An educated,
general audience
Purpose: Inform
on/persuade about a topic
in an in-depth way
Is usually colorful, has
pictures; has a high text-topicture radio
Varies; around 10 pages
Varies; usually a
member of general
public
Audience: The general
public
Purpose: Informal
entertainment or
information
Includes non-textual
media such as video,
pictures, podcasts, etc.
Varies
Usually long, 12-20 pages
Bibliography @ end of article
**peer-reviewed**
EXAMPLES
-Scholarly article found
through GoogleScholar
-Scholarly article through
discipline-specific database
-Chapter in a book
-Article in an anthology
(collection of articles by
various authors)
Quotes from/refers to
experts, but not always has
a bibliography
EXAMPLES
-The New York Times
-Atlantic Monthly
-Harpers Bazaar
-NPR or PBS piece,
interview or podcast
-TedTalks (as long as the
speaker is an expert),
Apple’s iTunes U podcasts
-Psychology Today
-Web sources ending in
.edu or .gov
-Program presented on
History Channel, Discovery
Channel, and so forth
DOES NOT INCLUDE
-Popular magazine articles
i.e. People, Sports
Illustrated, Time,
Cosmopolitan
Usually will not include a
bibliography
EXAMPLES
-Articles linked on
Facebook or other social
media
-An organization’s
website
-BuzzFeed
-Personal blog
-News article (print or
online)
-YouTube video
-Data visualization such
as an infographic
-Wikipedia (but I would
steer clear of using
Wikipedia as one of your
sources!)
GUIDE TO THE RESEARCH PROCESS
Selecting Research Sources by Faye Prichard (edited)
Perhaps the two most important steps in creating a strong research essay are choosing the
right research question and finding the best possible sources. Your research won’t amount to
much if you find a lot of sources but they aren’t reliable and up-to-date. I want to see you come
out of this process, and out of every research experience, having the best, and most honest
answer possible, for your question. While we will work on how to find sources in class what I
hope to lay out for you here are guideline to make the process of evaluating sources clearer.
First, the most important rule to keep in mind is that all of your information must be
credible, reliable and current. When I’m thinking about credibility, I’m asking myself who wrote
the information and what their expertise is in the field. When I’m checking reliability, I’m
looking to see what evidence the author uses to support his or her points and where that
information comes from (on first glance, an extensive bibliography is a good indicator of this
kind of work) and finally your research won’t be much good to you if you are not using the most
current data. These rules apply to whatever kinds of sources you’ll be looking at. Here, I’ll try to
give you some pointers that are specific to the categories of sources and information that you will
be using.
Books:
Students often tend to approach books with a kind of reverence as though everything that
is between two hard covers is of equal value. That is simply not the case. You will find lots of
books that deal with your topic, but not necessarily in an academic way. Once you find books
that deal with your research interest, you will want to put those books though a series of
questions or checks that test their level of usefulness for an academic research project. Look
carefully for these traits:
 The book has an author who is an expert in the field that he or she is writing about.
Sometimes the book has a blurb that tells you a bit about the author’s credentials, but this
isn’t always sufficient. Be thorough in your approach. Look the author up on the internet or
in the Who’s Who books in the library. Make sure that he or she has a professional reputation;
 A scholarly book almost always has an extensive bibliography in the back. Make sure that
the author is using source material to back up his or her claims and that they are using
reputable sources to do that;
 The book has a relevant date of publication. It’s ok to use an older book if you are looking
for historical perspective, but a book written in the year 2000 would give you the most recent
information about stem cell research;
 Also, look at the book’s publisher. This won’t always be helpful. You can’t tell everything
about a book by who publishes it, BUT University presses publish mostly scholarly material,
so that’s a good hint that you might have a strong research text.
Journals:
Journals are often where the best and most current research materials reside. Because it
takes significantly less time for articles to get published in a journal than it takes to publish entire
books, we can find some of the most current research in any field in its professional journals.
Students however tend to shy away from journal articles because they have a difficult time
navigating between academic journals and more popular kinds of journal materials. For our
purposes, it will be useful to think of journals as any kind of print text that is not a book. We can
break journals into four categories that will make it easier for you to determine their usefulness.

Scholarly Journals are written by experts for experts. They use high-level language and
terminology appropriate to their field and assume a high level of education on the part of
their readers. They usually are fairly plain to look at and have very few pictures or
advertisements. What ads they do have are specific to the field of interest. For example, the
MLA Journal (Modern Language Association) might have small ads for rare books or
conferences in the back of the journal. These journals are probably the most useful in terms
of research.

Substantive Journals contain articles written by staff writers, but they take on their
subjects in an in-depth way and most articles are at least ten pages in length. While they
do have colorful ads and pictures and look like magazines, they tend to have a high text to
picture ratio, and they assume a high level of education on the part of their readers. These
journals can often contain very helpful research information. Some good examples might
be the The Atlantic Monthly or Harpers.

Popular Journals include most of what we think of as magazines and these days, many
newspapers. Their job is primarily to entertain although some do try to inform. Most of
the articles are short, and tend not to take on subjects in much detail or include much new
information. They generally have more ads and pictures than text and are not very helpful
in terms of research. Some examples of this category are Newsweek, Time, Cosmopolitan,
and Sports Illustrated. This may seem a bit confusing since magazines like Time, or
Newsweek often take on quite serious subjects. The distinction is that they don’t cover them
in an extensive way, mostly looking at the surface of issues. In addition, sensational journals,
like tabloids are not useful at all for research.
These journal categories are helpful in terms of helping you evaluate sources, but they are not
always firm categories. Some journals may overlap two categories or be hard to categorize.
National Geographic, for instance has very in-depth and informative articles, but also has lots of
pictures. Newspapers, depending on the publisher, could fall into a number of categories and
some may have popular articles as well as strong substantive ones. As a general rule, you don’t
want to choose very short articles from any journal since they won’t provide you with much
information or the sources for that information.
Web Sources:
In some ways web-based sources are the most difficult to talk about with students
because things change with the web very quickly and students are pre-disposed to like web
sources because it is often easier and quicker to find them. The problem is, web sources aren’t
always reliable and students often have a difficult time assessing their value. In our class, I do
not want many of your sources to come from the internet; I think that is quite valuable for you to
learn how to find more traditional kinds of research materials that many of your professors will
expect to find in academic papers. I’ll outline a couple of categories of web sources that will
make it easier for you to determine which will, and which won’t, be acceptable for university
level work.
Web Sources can loosely be categorized as For Free or For Fee. That category can be very
helpful in determining whether a source is useful to you or not. Through the VCU library many
journal articles and even whole books are available through the web. These For Fee resources
are paid for by the university with your technology fees. Not all of these are scholarly, but they
usually account for where their information comes from and some of them can be quite useful.
Example of these kinds of sources include articles that come from Infotrac which is a database
that houses articles from over thirteen thousand journals, and articles from Lexis-Nexis, a
database which include articles from newspapers around the world as well as transcripts from
some television news shows. It is still incumbent upon you to know who the author is and what
quality of information he or she uses. You must also ascertain the depth of the discussion. You
should also look carefully at what journal the article comes from and if you haven’t heard of it,
look it up. Most of the web databases will house both scholarly and non-scholarly articles.
For Free sites, what you generally think of as internet sites, are very difficult to navigate for
quality. This is true mostly because it is often difficult to tell who is responsible for the
information that you see. Looking carefully at the site’s URL (address) will give you some very
important clues.
 .com and .net sites are usually not useful at all. Those sites are set up to sell and to
advertise and mostly it is difficult to tell who is responsible for the information there.
 .edu sites are run by universities. Information that you find on those sites is
generally reputable although you still need to know the credentials of the authors.
 .gov sites can have very useful information such as census data, but keep in mind
that some of what is there is also a product of the particular bias of each
administration.
 .mil sites can also be useful for military statistics and history, but the same caution
applies as to .gov sites.
A word of caution about all internet sources: With constant changes in the web there are more
good sources available through the internet than ever before. For example, Google Scholar has
some very reputable and helpful scholarly articles. BUT sometimes websites that look quite
reputable are set up to manipulate their readers. It is your responsibility to understand and think
critically about the information that is being presented to you. Take a look at the following entry
from Google that pops up when you type in “Martin Luther King Jr.”
Martin Luther King Jr. - A True Historical Examination
The truth about Martin Luther King: Includes historical trivia, articles and pictures. A
valuable resource for teachers and students alike.
www.martinlutherking.org/ - 6k - Cached - Similar pages
While this appears, at first glance, to be a reputable site, in fact, it is published by a group called
StormFront, a White Supremacist organization. I think that if you read the site carefully you
would see that they have no clear sources for their material, but you could also check any site
that you were curious about by looking on www.easywhois.com
This site allows you to enter the address of any website on Google and find out who sponsors
and pays for its presence.