Types of Information Sources

Julie Feighery; James Henry Smith

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Julie Feighery and James Henry Smith

Consider a topic such as the safety of genetically modified food. Wading into this large and controversial area, you will quickly discover that information about it comes from a wide range of sources:

Blogs and opinion pieces
Natural medicine and consumer health sites
Scientific research articles
Government and NGO sites
Books, newspapers, and magazine articles

Each of these types of sources has different content, written by people with varying levels of expertise, and written for different audiences. And each of these types of sources will have a different value for you, depending on the context and requirements of your research need. Some assignments will require that you use scholarly, academic sources that have to undergo a lengthy editorial process and therefore take longer to appear. Other assignments may allow you to use less formal, popular sources of information that may be more timely.

Social media		real-time, opinion, commentary, general audience
Website		possible commercial purposes, opinion, general audience
Newspapers, news sites		up-to-date current events, editorial opinion, commentary, general audience
Magazines		current events, topics of interest to general audience
Government/NGO		reports, standards, statistics, more targeted audience
Scholarly article		new research by scholars for other scholars, expert audience
Scholarly book		in-depth coverage of a topic by expert/experts, targeted audience
Encyclopedia, Wikipedia		overview, background information, general audience

Fig. 2.2 Types of information sources.

We have seen where we can find scholarly books (IUCAT) and background sources. One format that is becoming increasingly used on college campuses that is not listed here is film. The library has a variety of film databases that you may be asked to use in some of your classes.