Understanding popular versus scholarly resources
What's the difference?
Popular sources usually:
- Convey ideas and information to a wide or general audience, and are often authored by journalists.
- Do not assume the reader has expertise on the subject.
- Avoid technical terminology.
- Make complex ideas simpler for non-specialists to understand.
- Prioritize imparting general understanding, avoiding granular detail or exacting distinctions.
- Undergo more or less review, perhaps by fact-checkers or editors.
- Can cover very recent events, even in real time.
By contrast, scholarly sources usually:
- Are written by professional researchers (professors, fellows at institutes, laboratory scientists, etc.) for other professional researchers, their peers.
- Assume expertise on the subject.
- Use technical vocabulary, notation, formulae, etc.
- Prioritize depth of understanding, detail, and precision.
- Are subject to extensive quality control through some form of peer review.
- Investigate and discuss events that have occurred less recently.
Which should you use?
This depends on the nature of your project and your needs. Some possible factors to consider include:
- Recency.
- Popular sources like newspapers, magazines, blog posts, TikTok or YouTube videos, etc. can provide information on very recent events.
- Scholarly studies often analyze information these sources themselves first report.
- Scholarly research tends to gather more extensive information/data about events or issues, and is very often peer-reviewed, a process which generally takes considerable time (months or years).
- Journalists often summarize and simplify dense scholarly research to convey it to larger audiences.
- Possibilities of the medium.
- In some genres of popular reporting and commentary, the less-formal context allows authors or creators to weave personal voice, perspective, experiences, and reactions into their writing (or other content).
- While scholarly sources tend to take the form of academic text with illustrations, popular sources can more easily and frequently be in a hybrid or multimedia form, as in the interactive features in digital editions of major newspapers, the editing style of video commentary, and so on.
