ETHN-100 Dr. Hinzo

One type of source that you might want to use for this assignment is a news source. Sometimes they are also referred to as a popular source. Some characteristics of a news or popular source include that they are:

• written by journalists for a general audience
• coverage is of-the-moment, as things are happening and unfolding
• often visually attractive, with glossy pages and color images
• may feature advertisements
• broader in coverage than scholarly sources because they are created for a wide audience
• often shorter in length than scholarly sources
• typically published on a more frequent basis than scholarly sources
• tend to be entertaining in nature
• might not cite other sources, either in text or with a bibliography

Another type of source is a scholarly source. A scholarly source provides more analysis and interpretation than a news or popular source. Unlike news or popular sources, they take a long time to be published and usually appear months or years after the fact of something happening. Scholarly sources often:

• are written by and for academics, faculty, students, scholars, or researchers
• are critically evaluated by several scholars (expert peer reviewers) to assess the quality of the methodology, data, and conclusions presented before being published
• present original research and new knowledge
• tend to be long in length (10+ pages), text-heavy, and black and white in appearance
• are very detailed in nature, on very specific topics
• have extensive in-text documentation and lengthy bibliography
• are published less often than popular sources (perhaps quarterly or semi-annually)