4. Identify What You Found - Team Internship Program - City DPW

Types of Information You WIll Find

When you do research, you will think about the types of sources you need to support your issue. While the open web and Google have many sources you can use, to make sure you have credible, relevant information, you may need academic or scholarly sources.

Academic sources, also called scholarly sources, are written by experts in a field, people who have advanced degrees in a given discipline. They usually have more complicated language and provide references or other sources they use to support their topic in the form of citations. Academic sources can most easily be found in library databases than on the open web.

You will also see:

Popular magazine articles are typically written by journalists to entertain or inform a general audience,
Trade publications may be written by experts in a certain industry, but they are not considered scholarly, as they share general news, trends, and opinions, rather than advanced research, and are not peer-reviewed.

Here is a table comparing Popular Magazines, Academic Sources, and Trade Publications and their features:

	Popular Magazines	Academic/Scholarly (including peer-reviewed)	Trade Publications
Content	Current events; general interest articles	Research results/reports; reviews of research (review articles); book reviews	Articles about a certain business or industry
Purpose	To inform, entertain, or elicit an emotional response	To share research or scholarship with the academic community	To inform about business or industry news, trends, or products
Author	Staff writers, journalists, freelancers	Scholars/researchers	Staff writers, business/industry professionals
Audience	General public	Scholars, researchers, students	Business/industry professionals
Review	Staff editor	Editorial board made up of other scholars and researchers. Some articles are peer-reviewed	Staff editor
Citations	May not have citations, or may be informal (ex. according to... or links)	Bibliographies, references, endnotes, footnotes	Few, may or may not have any
Frequency	Weekly/monthly	Quarterly or semi-annually	Weekly/monthly
Ads*	Numerous ads for a variety of products	Minimal, usually only for scholarly products like books	Ads are for products geared toward specific industry
Examples on Publisher Site	Washington Post; Time; New York Times; Aerospace Engineering Blog	The Aeronautical Journal; International Journal of Aerospace Engineering; IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine	Aerospace Magazine; Avionics Magazine; Flight International; Aviation International News; Flying Mag; IEEE Access; International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Journal
Examples in Library Databases (Requires GCC Login)	Washington Post; Time; New York Times	The Aeronautical Journal; International Journal of Aerospace Engineering; Nature	Avionics Magazine; Flight International

Text and chart adapted from UTexas Libguide.