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POSC 300

A guide to completing research assignments for Professor Fletcher's POSC300 class.

Scholarly or Popular?

Differences in identifying scholarly and popular sources

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You will need to find scholarly articles to serve as a solid base for any arguments you make in your paper. Databases have all sorts in them, not just peer reviewed sources. Use the comparisons above to help you figure out if a particular article is scholarly or not. Note that a peer reviewed journal is only one piece of that. Even scholarly journals have opinion pieces, book  reviews, product reviews, etc.

Evaluating Resources

Infographic of the CRAAP Test for evaluating materials

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The CRAAP test is just one method for determining what kind of quality a resource is. It's useful for all resources, but especially so for anything you find outside of the scholarly world.

Information Cycle

Infographic of the information cycle timeline, or how long it might take information to be published in a particular form after an event happens.

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This information cycle is especially important if you are working on a topic that is super current. If it has just happened there probably won't be any scholarly articles written about it yet. However, remember that you can broaden out your thought process a little.

For instance, there might not be anything scholarly on a hurricane that has just occurred, but there may be scholarly work on a hurricane that happened last year. Can you combine current news articles and government websites with scholarly work from a similar past situation?