Once you have a general idea about the basic needs you have for your research, it’s time to start tracking down your secondary sources. Thankfully, we live in a world that is swimming with information. Back in the decades when the authors of this textbook first started researching, we all had to go to a library and search through a physical card catalog to find books. If you wanted to research a topic in magazine or journal articles, you had to look up key terms in a giant book, printed annually, known as an index of periodicals. Researchers could literally spend hours in the library and find just one or two sources that were applicable to their topic.
Today information is quite literally at our fingertips. In fact, we have the opposite problem from a couple of decades ago—we have too much information at our fingertips. As a result, we now must be more skeptical about our sources of information.
In this section we’ll discuss how to find reliable information in both popular and scholarly (or peer-reviewed) sources.
Popular Information Sources
Popular (or non-academic) information sources are written so that they can be understood by the general public. Most popular sources are written at a sixth- to eighth-grade reading level, so that they can be read by someone without a high school diploma. However, the information often contained in these sources is often quite limited because it must be conveyed in such simple terms for its target audience.
Books
A book is a full-length manuscript consisting of chapters. Books can be written by single or multiple authors, as well as be edited collections of essays by different authors. They are available as either hard or digital copy, and some libraries have both types in their collections.
If you use your library’s databases to find a book, you have access to the books of other libraries as well via interlibrary loan. An interlibrary loan is a process where librarians are able to search other libraries to locate the book a researcher is trying to find. If another library has that book, then the library asks to borrow it for a short period of time. Depending on how easy a book is to find, your library could receive it in a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Keep in mind that interlibrary loans take time, so do not expect to get a book at the last minute. The more lead time you provide a librarian to find a book you are looking for, the greater the likelihood that the book will be sent through the mail to your library on time.
Furthermore, in today’s world, we have one of the greatest online card catalogs ever created—and it wasn’t created for libraries at all! Retail bookseller sites like Amazon.com can be a great source for finding books that may be applicable to your topic, and the best part is, you don’t actually need to purchase the book because your library may actually own a copy of a book or be able to request it for you via interlibrary loan. If you find a book that you think may be appropriate, plug that book’s title into your school’s electronic library catalog. If your library owns the book, you can go to the library and pick it up today.
Finally, some books are partially or entirely available for free via the world wide web as digitized content via on-line libraries. Some online libraries we recommend are Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org), Google Books (http://books.google.com), Read Print (http://www.readprint.com), Open Library (http://openlibrary.org), and Get Free e-Books (http://www.getfreeebooks.com). This is a short list of just a handful of the libraries that are now offering free e-content.
General-Interest Periodicals
General-interest periodicals are magazines and newsletters published regularly. Some popular magazines in this category include The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian. These magazines are considered “general interest” because most people in the United States could pick up a copy of these magazines and find them interesting and topical.
Special-Interest Periodicals
Special-interest periodicals are magazines and newsletters that are published for a narrower audience. Some more widely known special-interest periodicals are Sports Illustrated, Bloomberg’s Business Week, GQ, Vogue, Popular Science, National Geographic, The Economist, and Scientific American. But for every major magazine, there are a great many other lesser-known magazines like American Coin Op Magazine, Varmint Hunter, Fangoria, Shark Diver Magazine, Pet Product News International, Water Garden News, to name just a few.
Newspapers, Blogs, and Newsgathering Agencies
Newspapers and blogs are other major sources of popular information. A few blogs (e.g., The Huffington Post, Talkingpoints Memo, The Daily Beast, Salon) function similarly to traditional newspapers. Furthermore, in the past few years we’ve lost many traditional newspapers around the United States; cities that used to have four or five daily papers may now only have one or two.
Major newspapers in the United States include The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Houston Chronicle, and USAToday, and major international English-language newspapers include The Guardian [London], The Independent [London], and The Irish Times. Most colleges and universities subscribe to a number of these newspapers in paper form or have access to them electronically. Furthermore, LexisNexis, a database many colleges and universities subscribe to, has access to full text newspaper articles from these newspapers and many more around the world.
In addition to traditional newspapers, blogs are becoming a mainstay of information in today’s society. In fact, since the dawn of the twenty-first century many major news stories have been broken by professional bloggers rather than traditional newspaper reporters (Ochman, 2007). Although anyone can create a blog, there are many reputable blog sites that are run by professional journalists. As such, blogs can be a great source of information. However, as with all information on the Internet, you often have to wade through a lot of junk to find useful, accurate information.
Finally, news-gathering organizations can also be reliable sources of popular information. News-gathering organizations may or may not be associated with a publication or network. For example, AP (Associated Press) and Reuters are wire services that sell content to newspapers and television stations worldwide from their network of reporters. Other reliable newsgathering sources include BBC News (United Kingdom), CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) News, PBS (Public Broadcasting System—United States), and Al Jazeera World News (analysis from the Middle East and worldwide).
Encyclopedias
Encyclopedias provide short, very general information about a topic and are available in both print and electronic formats, and their content can range from eclectic and general (e.g., Encyclopædia Britannica, Wikipedia) to the very specific (e.g., Encyclopedia of 20th Century Architecture, The Encyclopedia of the Zombie: The Walking Dead in Popular Culture and Myth, Listen to Punk Rock!: Exploring a Musical Genre). It is important to keep in mind that general encyclopedias are designed to give only brief, fairly superficial summaries of a topic area. Thus, they may be useful for finding out what something is if it is referenced in another source, but they are generally not a useful source for your actual speech. In fact, many instructors do not allow students to use encyclopedias as sources for their speeches for this very reason. More specialized encyclopedias, however, often provide more detailed summaries of topics and include references.
One of the most popular online encyclopedic sources is Wikipedia. Like other encyclopedias, it can be useful for finding out basic information (e.g., what baseball teams did Catfish Hunter play for?) but will not give you the depth of information you need for a speech. Also keep in mind that Wikipedia, unlike the general and specialized encyclopedias available through your library, can be edited by anyone and therefore often contains content errors and biased information. If you are a fan of The Colbert Report, you probably know that host Stephen Colbert has, on several occasions, asked viewers to change Wikipedia content to reflect his views of the world. This is just one example of why one should always be careful of information on the web, but this advice is even more important when considering group-edited sites such as Wikipedia.
Websites
Websites are the last major source of nonacademic information. Unfortunately, you can spend hours and hours searching for information and never quite find what you’re looking for if you don’t devise an Internet search strategy. Try Googling your topic or key terms and see what the search engine suggests. Sometimes Google can suggest a more specific focus for your search. Next, if you find a web page with what looks like useful information, learn about the site. Go to it’s “about” section (and be suspicious of websites without an about section) or even try doing a separate Google search about the website and/or its author to learn more. Finally, don’t be misled by domain name endings. Just because a site ends in a .org doesn’t mean that the site was made by a legitimate organization because anyone can purchase these domain name endings. Sites ending in .gov or .edu, on the other hand, are reliable, since only U. S. based government sector agencies and organizations (including state and local governments) and educational institutions are eligible to purchase them.
Scholarly (or Peer-Reviewed Sources)
Scholarly, or peer-reviewed sources, are the gold standard of reliable information, so many professors will require that you use some of these type of sources in your assignments. Scholarly sources are written by experts in their field, usually professors in a specific discipline. Scholarly sources contain the original research of these experts, which has been vetted by their peers, other experts in their field, who ensure that the research is based on the most recent and reliable scholarship in that discipline. Scholarly or peer-reviewed sources are usually found in academic journals and books published by university presses as well as some other publishers.
Below are some types of scholarly sources. To search for scholarly sources in your library’s catalogue or databases, set a limiter that will confine your results to peer-reviewed sources including academic journals.
Scholarly Books
Scholarly books are books are primarily written by academics for other academics who use this information to conduct their own research. Scholarly books are works of non-fiction that are published by university presses (Louisiana State University Press, Harvard University Press, University Press of Mississippi, for example) as well as a handful of other major publishers who specialize in scholarly books.
Some of these non-university presses specializing in academic books include:
SAGE Press
Routledge
Jossey-Bass
Pfeiffer
The American Psychological Association
The National Communication Association
Palgrave MacMillian
Scarecrow Press
McFarland
Polity Press
Alfred A. Knopf
Wiley Blackwell
Basic Books
Clarendon Press
John Wiley and Sons
Harper and Row
Pergamon Press
Random House
Springer
However, these books can be useful for non-academics as well because they contain original research and are thoroughly reviewed by other experts in the field prior to publication. To find information of interest in a scholarly book, try reading its table of contents to determine if a specific chapter focuses on your topic, or looking through the index in back for keywords related to your topic.
Scholarly Articles
Shorter scholarly work is published as articles in academic journals. Because every academic subfield has its own journals, you should never have a problem finding the best and most recent research on a topic.
Dissertations and Theses
Dissertations and theses are manuscripts written by PhD and master’s degree candidates. These manuscripts are also peer-reviewed sources because they must be approved by a panel of soon-to-be peers in the author’s field in order for them to graduate.
