Popular information or popular articles are information or articles you would find for normal, everyday consumption. They are for the general public to get the idea rather than those who need the scholarly insight. Articles found on popular sources may not have included sources, often are less detailed, and are usually a summery-level of the information that you would need to get the information you should have. Popular articles could be a good jumping point to what is being talked about your topic or even where to start with your topic, but you should dig deeper to find more scholarly articles for support.
On the flip side, scholarly articles are written for a in-depth reading of the topic at hand by specialists in that field. These are usually found in journals or books. Usually, these articles go through a peer review to get published, but not all the time. Scholarly articles cite their sources and references which you can use to find and use in your own research.
Librarian Morgan found the above podcast episode interesting as it relates to research. Dr. Sydnee McElroy discusses how to shift through all of the research that is available on all of the internet and how she does it for their podcast and in her practice.
Library 160: Introduction to College-Level Research Copyright © 2021 by Iowa State University Library Instruction Services is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
We talked about peer review but what does that even mean? Peer reviewed articles are articles written by experts in the field and that are evaluated by reviewed by the scholar's peers to determine if the work is accurate, qualitative, and meet the expectations of the field's standards.
First, the researcher submits their paper to the publication to be evaluated.They are checked for validity, originality, and for being complete by experts. Any comments are sent back to the researcher for either more research or editing before the editor of the publication looks at the final draft. If the editor accepts the draft, then the article gets published.
This is why peer reviewed articles are highly important in research as many articles get vetted through this process through people of their trade.
