Scholarly v. Popular
Channel: Amelia Gayle Gorgas
Date: 2014-09-18

This video carries the creative commons license: Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND ) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/)

Look at some of the key differences between scholarly and popular sources.

Transcript: 

Hi. My name is Rob and I'm going to talk to you today about scholarly and popular sources. 

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to distinguish between the two types of sources, in order to better choose what is appropriate for your needs. 

Popular sources include magazines, newspapers, and most books. 
This Rolling Stone article is an example of a popular source. 
Popular sources have a very fast publication process that allows for timely delivery to the public. You'll be able to find sources that have been published in the past couple of months, weeks, or even days. The language of popular sources is informal. The intended audience of popular sources are non-experts, so there will not be a lot of technical language or jargon. Popular sources often will not use a citation style like MLA or APA to cite references. 

I'm going to show you an example of a scholarly source now. Scholarly sources will often have an abstract or summary of what the article is about located at the beginning of the article. Scholarly sources are written by experts in each field of study and are intended to be read by other experts. Prior knowledge of the topic is expected of the readers of scholarly sources. Academic journal articles and some books are considered scholarly sources, while popular sources are also often written by experts with good credentials, for a source to be scholarly, it is a necessity to have credentials and a reputation in academia. 

Part of the publication process scholarly sources go through is a process called "peer review." Peer review is when an author submits an article to a journal, and then other experts review it and then send it back to the author with suggested revisions. This can repeated many times before an article is approved to be published. It may take many months and sometimes years before an article becomes published. 

Scholarly sources will always cite references using one of the formal citation styles. The rigorous publication process, formal writing, and inclusion of academic research are what ultimately makes a source "scholarly."  

Scholarly sources and popular sources can both be useful in your research. What you will choose as a source depends on the requirements of your assignment. Thank you for watching today, please use the Ask-A-Librarian service on our website. To get research help go to ask.lib.ua.edu. You can also call us at 205-348-6047 or text us your questions at 205.377.0920. You can tweet to the library @GorgasLib