6 Types of Information Sources
Consider a topic such as the safety of genetically modified food. Wading into this large and controversial area, you will quickly discover that information about it comes from a wide range of sources:
- Blogs and opinion pieces
- Natural medicine and consumer health sites
- Scientific research articles
- Government and NGO sites
- Books, newspapers, and magazine articles
Each of these types of sources has different content, written by people with varying levels of expertise, and written for different audiences. And each of these types of sources will have a different value for you, depending on the context and requirements of your research need. Some assignments will require that you use scholarly, academic sources that have to undergo a lengthy editorial process and therefore take longer to appear. Other assignments may allow you to use less formal, popular sources of information that may be more timely.
| Newspaper |  |
up-to-date current events, editorial opinion, commentary, general audience |
| Encyclopedia, Wikipedia |  |
overview, background information, general audience |
| Website |  |
possible commercial purposes, opinion, general audience |
| Magazine |  |
current events, topics of interest to general audience |
| Government/NGO |  |
reports, standards, statistics, more targeted audience |
| Scholarly article |  |
new research by scholars for other scholars, expert audience |
| Scholarly book |  |
in-depth coverage of a topic by expert/experts, targeted audience |
| Social media post, blog |  |
real-time, opinion, commentary, general audience |
