Speech 101: Types of Sources & Peer Reviewed

Different sources meet different needs.

Find a source type that meets your needs.

Types of Sources

• Book - more in-depth but dated information
• Encyclopedia or dictionary - very brief overviews of topics
• Peer-reviewed journal article - up-to-date information on a topic; peer-review increases the reliability of the information
• Magazine article - up-to-date information, often not very reliable and/or biased
• Newspaper article - most up-to-date information on news stories; due to deadlines, information may be inaccurate
• Government document - information gathered by a government intended for its own use or use by the public
• Pamphlet - brief information that may be inaccurate or biased
• Advertisement - always biased information
• Webpage - wide variety of quality of information and it may be difficult to tell how old the information is
• Multimedia - video or audio sources with a wide variety of quality of information
• Blogs, message boards, discussion lists, chat rooms, e-mails - these vary widely in quality

Why do you need the information?

• Have you been diagnosed with a disease and need to know about treatments?
• Are you trying to win a bet about who won your high school's football game yesterday?
• Do you have a 4-5 minute speech to give on a topic?
• Do you want to write a dissertation to finish up a Ph.D?

What kind of information will satisfy your need?

• If accuracy is important, look for books published by academic or scholarly publishers as well as articles from peer-reviewed or other academic journals.
• If timeliness is important, especially for a news source, check out newspapers and news magazines.
• If depth of coverage is important, check out books.
• If speed of answer is important (e.g. for quiz night), check out web pages

Citing/ethics

• Documentation of sources/background information/literature review (C&RL News)
• Are there any special ethical concerns arising from the use of human or other animal subjects? (Nature)

Research reported on

• Methodology (C&RL News)
• Analysis/Logic of argumentation (C&RL News)
• Are there other experiments or work that would strengthen the paper further? (Nature)

Paper/Writing

• Presentation (C&RL News)
• Who will be interested in reading the paper, and why? (Nature)
• How does the paper stand out from others in its field? (Nature)

Scholarly Communication

• Relevance to advancing knowledge in the field of academic librarianship (C&RL News)
• Is the paper likely to be one of the five most significant papers published in the discipline this year? (Nature)
• Are the claims appropriately discussed in the context of previous literature? (Nature)

Find sets of criteria for journals

• Nature
• PLOS Genetics
• International Journal of Design
• American Art