Skip to Main Content
Ask A Librarian

INTS 300 - Social Inquiry in International Studies

Peer-Reviewed Journals

Peer-Reviewed Journals

  • Purpose: to convey academic research.

  • Audience: educated people in the discipline, typically researchers themselves. Scientists; college and university professors

  • Conventions: highly structured organization; contains footnotes or works cited pages; published after review by experts in the field; technical or specialized language.

  • Trouble-Spots: content may be difficult for a lay-person to understand.

Popular Source - Newspapers, Magazines, & Blogs

Popular sources are intended for a general audience of readers and are written typically to entertain, inform, or persuade. Popular sources help you answer who, what, when, and where questions and are essential for finding information about current events or issues.

Think Tanks

A think tank is a not-for-profit research institution, usually separate from a university, that conducts applied, policy-relevant research and analysis; and is involved in public affairs as well. When using think tanks, you need to be mindful that think tanks can be, and often are, advocacy oriented. The fact that a think tank refers to itself as non-partisan just means that it has no formal connection to a political party, not that it doesn’t have an ideological orientation that may be more consistent with a given political party.

User-Generated Content

User-Generated Content is defined as any type of content that has been created and put out there by unpaid contributors. This content is then made publicly available by the system the content was created on.