Understanding Source Types
Odds are good that your professor wants you to use certain types of textual sources in your writing. The three broad categories—popular, trade, and scholarly—have varying degrees of reliability and usefulness in college-level writing.
Recognizing Popular Sources
Popular sources are written for an interested audience without any specialized knowledge. This is the kind of source that you’ll find on magazine racks or at the grocery store check-out.
Here are some examples of popular sources:
- Magazines like Time and National Geographic
- Newspapers like Wall Street Journal and Washington Post
- Popular websites like Politico and ESPN.com
- Radio and television sources like NPR (National Public Radio) and CNN (Cable News Network)
- Encyclopedias like Britannica and WebMD
While many of these sources are reputable, they often won’t be acceptable for college-level writing because they aren’t written by subject-matter experts, and they often don’t have references. Don’t plan to use these unless your professor explicitly tells you that you can or should.
Recognizing Trade Sources
Trade publications are written for professional audiences. Most industries have print and/or electronic resources designed specifically for people working in that field. In higher education, for example, there is The Chronicle of Higher Education and Insider Higher Ed, both of which provide news and information relevant for those working in colleges and universities. There are also websites like Edutopia and AAC&U (American Association of Colleges and Universities).
Many trade sources are published by professional organizations. Professional organizations provide support for people working in a particular field, and as you move into advanced classes in your major, you should ask your professors about these.
As with popular sources, many of these are quite reputable. While they are considered more useful for college-level research than popular sources, they are often unacceptable because the writing does not undergo peer review (see below), and there may be no citations. Like popular sources, check with your professor.
Recognizing Scholarly Sources
Scholarly sources are considered the gold standard because they are written by researchers for researchers. Scholarly sources rely on a process called “peer review” whereby research articles are evaluated by other researchers in the same field for the appropriateness of their methods and accuracy of their findings. Scholarly articles generally do not get published unless they make a contribution to research in the field.
You can often identify scholarly articles because they appear in publications with titles that include words like “journal” and “research.” Articles from these publications do not include images designed to draw interest; instead, they often include data-driven graphics, like charts and tables, though not in all disciplines. They also tend to have lots of citations and reference lists at the end.
Note from Dr. Evans
Typically, your professors will provide you with the academic sources you may use for Adams State courses. However, your prison library will likely have some options to help you do research and add to your essays.
These sources are highly reputable, and particularly in your upper-level major courses, you will almost certainly be expected to use these for most of your textual sources. Be warned, though. These can be very difficult to read because novices and students aren’t the audience—experts are. Be sure to allow extra time to read these sources.
Dr. Evans Pro-Tip
When finding new sources for your research, always start by looking over the appendices and bibliographies located in the back of the book. You don’t necessarily need computer access to find reliable and credible resources.
We will practice this in the library scavenger hunt assignment.
Understanding Primary and Secondary Sources
Popular, trade, and scholarly sources all can be either primary sources or secondary sources. For example, a news story reporting events would be a primary source, and commentary on that reporting would be a secondary source, but both would be popular sources. Even among scholarly sources, there are primary and secondary sources.
Primary Sources
Primary sources are first-hand accounts or documents created in historical real-time. They include texts of laws, speeches, letters, photographs, works of literature and art, and newspaper reports in which the reporter was an actual witness to the event or reporting the words of those who witnessed it. These sources are also considered highly reputable, and you may often be asked to use primary sources in your writing.
Reports of original research are also primary sources because the researchers are presenting data that they have collected. A report on the findings from a study of changes in the diving behavior and habitats of whale sharks and the implications for tourism, for example, is a primary source because it explains findings based on data gathered by Gonzalo Araujo, Jessica Labaja, Sally Snow, Charlie Huveneers, and Alessandro Ponzo.
Secondary Sources
Secondary sources involve some kind of interpretation, which means that the author is determining what is valuable about the ideas in the source.
Secondary scholarly sources include review articles and meta-analyses. Review articles pull together research findings from multiple studies to explain what is known and what needs further research in a field. For example, Katherine Valencia, Cristian Rusu, Daniela Quiñones and Erick Jamet synthesized the findings in ninety-four published studies looking at how technology affects the learning of people with autism spectrum disorder, finding that particular elements of technology, including artificial intelligence and virtual reality promote learning for people with ASD.
Meta-analysis articles use statistics to combine smaller research studies. For example, Xue-Lei Fu, Lin Du, Yi-Ping Song, Hong-Lin Chen, and Wang-Qui Shen combined the statistical data of twenty-two smaller studies on injuries in professional snow sports to determine, among other things, that freestyle skiing has the highest rate of injury.
Don’t get caught up in whether a source is primary (original research) or secondary (interpretive). Think about which sources are going to be most useful for the intellectual work of the project you are working on.
Key Points: Understanding Source Types
- Popular sources are written for an interested public who has no specialized knowledge. While they may be reputable, your professors usually won’t want you to use them.
- Trade sources are written for professionals working in a relevant field. Like popular sources, they are often reputable, but your professors usually won’t want you to use these either.
- Scholarly sources are written by researchers for researchers, and your professors will often want you to use these.
- Primary sources report first-hand knowledge, including reports of research. These are often useful for college writing.
- Secondary sources interpret ideas and information in primary sources. These are also often useful for college writing.
- Tertiary sources, including encyclopedias and textbooks, contain predigested information, and generally cannot be used as sources for college writing.
- All three types of sources can be primary, secondary, or tertiary.