Day Of: Social Media, Internet, TV
- Breaking information
- Can be inaccurate, incomplete, biased, and highly emotional
Week Of: Newspapers
- More detailed and factual reporting
- Quotes from experts, statistics, and/or photographs
- Written by journalists for general audience (not scholarly)
- Opinion pieces begin to appear
Week After: Popular Magazines
- More detailed reporting including interviews, opinions, and analysis
- Authors are diverse: professional journalists, commentators, scholars, or experts in the field
- Factual information BUT can have bias reflecting the publication
Months After: Scholarly Journals
- Detailed analysis backed by evidence-based research
- Peer-reviewed which helps ensure accuracy and quality
- Detailed bibliographies
- Written by experts and scholars in the field
- Written for a specific audience (scholars) - can be difficult to understand because of discipline-specific language or jargon
A Year After: Books
- In-depth coverage often providing comprehensive overviews of topic
- Detailed bibliographies
- May have bias as authors' credentials and authority can vary
- Can be scholarly (detailed analysis) or popular (general discussion)
Years After: Reference Books (Bibliographies, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, etc.)
- Factual information written with little emotion
- Authors are scholars and/or experts
- Broad coverage of a topic
The design of this page was adapted in part from Research: By Course, Subject, or Topic, by University of Arizona Libraries, © 2020 The Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of The University of Arizona, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.