Pictures

  • Have you ever heard the phrase, "A picture is worth a thousand words"? It's true. Pictures can be used in research and provide valuable information as well. 
  • Historians will often use pictures in their research to see what life was like in certain time periods. If these pictures were taken during the time period the historian is researching, then they are called primary sources. If you have Mr. Bailey, you may have heard him mention this before.
  • Take a look at the picture on the left. What information can you gather from it?
  • Sometimes, pictures will be created using information. These pictures are called infographics because they contain information on a graphic. Essentially, they are a visual representation of data.
  • Check out the infographic on the right. Click on the picture if you want to see it bigger.
  • It includes a lot of information right? It even has a graph within the picture. So, sometimes infographics might have resources within them.

Editorials

When researching, editorials can contain good information as well. Editorials are news articles. News articles can be informative because journalists will often include facts and data within their writing. 

However, editorials can also be very bias. If you want to use them, it's a good idea to collect a few articles covering the same topic from different news outlets. Check out some of these popular news outlets:

 

Scholarly Publications

Scholarly publications are what people commonly refer to as scholarly journals.

PennState does a good job explaining what scholarly journals are:

"Scholarly Journals are journals which are respected for the research and information they provide about the topic they cover. They are written by and for people who have experience in a discipline or field. The research is often refereed meaning that it is reviewed by other researchers who are knowledgeable about the topic of the article. They usually have a more serious look than most popular magazines and contain graphs and charts but do not usually have many pictures. Scholarly journals cite their sources using footnotes or bibliographies. Although some scholarly journals have advertisements they are not prominent and usually relate directly to the topic of the journal."

 

 

 

If you use Google Scholar or library databases (like EBSCO and Academic Search Premier), you will come across many scholarly journals. It's important to note though that not all the sources you find using these will be scholarly journals unless you refine your search to only look for them. Scholarly journals are not magazines either. Check out the table below to see the differences.

 

Works Cited

Members of the National Woman's Party picket the White House, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-31799 DLC.

PennState. "Scholarly Journals".http://www.sgps.psu.edu/foweb/lib/scholarly_journal/index.html. 17 Mar 2014.