Chapter 5: Authority and Bias
5.3 Popular and scholarly information
Authoritative sources can come in many forms. Most simply, sources of information can be categorized as popular or scholarly.
Popular information
Popular information covers a wide spectrum of topics and is designed to be easily understood by the general public. This information has not gone through a rigorous review process, and are less technical than scholarly materials. Articles found within popular sources may not include citations; instead they often offer a less-detailed, more surface-level summary of their topic. They might not even list an author. People magazine, Vogue, and Rolling Stone are examples of popular publications. At NKU, students often turn to popular sources for their assignments related to current events, popular culture, or leisure activities.
ProjectManhattan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Scholarly information
Scholarly information is an in-depth, well researched, narrowly focused body of knowledge created for an academic or specialized audience. This type of information is often found within scholarly books and journal articles. Scholarly books and articles undergo peer review. Peer review is the validation, critique, and rigorous process in which subject experts carefully evaluate and provide constructive feedback on research papers, ensuring their accuracy and suitability for publication. They usually contain subject-specific, technical language, and refer to the resources the authors used by including citations. Scholarly materials are often the product of a specific research project and contain information about the methods the authors used to reach their conclusions. These are helpful for projects where it is important to build a strong research-based foundation for your ideas or interpretation. Some examples of where you can find scholarly content are Google Scholar, Pubmed Central, Worldcat, and Science.gov. Students and researchers at NKU also turn to Steely Library for access to a wide range of databases that contain scholarly information.
Peer review
Because scholarly information is something your instructors expect you to use, it’s important to have an understanding of how it’s made. Here is the typical publication process for a peer-reviewed article:
- A researcher submits their paper to a journal to be considered for publication.
- The journal’s editor reviews the paper and sends it to subject experts for peer review.
- Those peer reviewers submit their feedback, including corrections and whether or not the article should be published.
- The editor reviews peer reviewers’ comments and sends them to the researcher.
- The researcher makes corrections and resubmits their article to the editor.
- The editor reviews and (maybe) accepts the corrected article for publication.
- If it gets this far, the researcher’s article is published!
| Popular | Scholarly |
| written for the general public; language is clear, simple, and direct | written