As the video on the information cycle revealed, you will encounter many different types of published materials in your research such as popular magazines, scholarly journals, books, encyclopedias, and more. Here is a summary of the different source types you will encounter.
Image: 2010 Newsstand Seattle by John Henderson from Seattle, USA. [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Item Types & Examples | Audience & Use |
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Newspaper
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Popular Magazines
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News Magazines
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Opinion Magazines
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Trade Magazines
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Scholarly Journals
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Books
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Research Starters (aka reference material)
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Many of these information sources are not free. Just as you have to subscribe to watch films on Netflix, you often you need to pay a subscription to gain access to newspapers, magazines, and academic journals.
What is the difference between a search engine (Google) and a library database?
Search engines, like Google, provide access to content in the open web — the part of the world wide web that anyone connected to the Internet can access for free. Google provides access to great websites including government websites, blogs, and specialty news sites. They are an important part of your research but you need to go further.
When conducting academic research, it is also important to use what many call the "deep web" or "fee web" — that part of the web that is not freely available. As noted, individuals, institutions, and companies pay for access to this content through subscriptions.
These deep web articles and resources are collected en masse in searchable websites called "databases." For example, Netflix and Hulu are databases of popular movies and TV shows.
Here's the good news!
These database subscriptions are already paid for by the libraries of Montgomery County Community College so you can access them freely! The library website provides access to these databases. We will demonstrate how to use these library resources in a live session before you start researching your final speeches.
Not only do databases offer a good quantity of scholarly information, but they offer easier searching for relevant information. This is because information can be filtered in numerous ways, including by subject, format, date of publication, number of pages, and peer-review. Additionally, databases are comprised of information that originates in print such as magazine and journal articles, books and book chapters, special reports, etc. granting these documents greater stability.
Image: Iceberg photomontage by Uwe Kils and Wiska Bodo on Wikimedia Commons.
Modified by Jerry Yarnetsky of MC3 Libraries. CC-BY-SA-4.0