The types of sources you might use for an academic paper are:
- Books: Background information is typically found in books. To determine if a book will be a valuable source, look at the introduction and table of contents. To pinpoint what to read, use the table of contents or look for your keywords in the index to determine a specific page.
- Articles: In particular, you will use articles that are published in scholarly, peer reviewed journals.
- Magazine Articles: These are articles that are published in popular magazines (think: Time, Sports Illustrated). You might use them in a project to provide more background or to provide an example of what you are writing about.
- Newspaper Articles: You might use a newspaper article to illustrate something that happened that is related to the topic of your paper.