Effective Writing in Psychology. Bernard C. Beins
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writing academic papers, regardless of your topic, you must use scholarly sources to support your argument. Popular sources address a general audience, so they present fewer details and less technical material about the research. Because they provide a less thorough picture of the research than a scholarly article does, for professionals, popular articles are less credible than scholarly ones. It is important that you draw on credible and rigorous—and thus scholarly—sources in academic writing, so we offer the following criteria to distinguish between popular and scholarly sources. Each subsection starts with questions that you can ask when evaluating a source.
Who Is the Author? Is the Author an Academic or Professional Who Is Writing about Research That She or He Conducted? How Many Authors Are Listed?
Academic researchers are most often the authors of scholarly sources, and their intention is to convey the results of their research. If the text is primary literature, the authors are reporting the results of their original experiments. In scientific disciplines, because several researchers may work on an experiment, scholarly articles often have more than one author. Popular sources more commonly have one author, and for some articles no author is listed, so the absence of an author's name is a good sign that you have a popular source. When a popular source does list an author, the author's academic and professional background is frequently in journalism, so the person who writes an article in Newsweek about sibling rivalry will most likely be a journalist, not a psychologist who does behavioral research. However, the authors of an article about sibling rivalry in The British Journal of Developmental Psychology will be the people who actually conducted the research. It is important to keep in mind that academic researchers may also write popular articles, so you need to consider more than just an author's credentials when assessing your sources.
Who Is the Audience? Does the Reader Require Technical Knowledge to Understand the Information in the Source?
The authors and readers of scholarly sources tend to be academics and expect that their peers will read them, so someone who has not studied the field being written about would probably not understand much of the content of these sources. An article about the same topic that appears in a popular source will be written differently because it is aiming at a lay audience. For this reason, authors of popular sources use language that is accessible to those who are not experts in the field. Of course, people who are academics or professionals might read popular sources, but the reverse is improbable: those untrained in a specific field are unlikely to read that field's scholarly sources.
In What Kind of Journal Did Your Source Appear? What Kind of Editorial Process Did the Source Go Through Before Being Published?
In general, scholarly publications have been peer reviewed and are published in an academic journal (if an article) or by an academic press (if a book). In this system, editors rely on reviewers who are knowledgeable in the author's academic area to assess the merit of manuscripts that are submitted for publication. Peer reviewers read the submissions at various stages in the publication process, often offering comments, asking questions, and making suggestions to ensure that the final publication contains sound and accurate research results. Reviewers may even recommend that the investigators conduct more research to strengthen their conclusions. To increase the chance that your research will lead you to scholarly sources, you can use databases like PsycINFO and Academic Search Premier (EBSCOhost), which catalog and allow you to limit your search results to peer‐reviewed publications.
In contrast, editors of popular publications want a general audience to be able to understand what they publish, so they will make sure that jargon is omitted or carefully explained. Although they also go through fact‐checking procedures, they will most likely not be able to evaluate the researchers' accuracy or credibility because they are not familiar with the subject written about or the conventions of the field. Therefore, using popular sources to support your thesis may actually weaken the credibility of your paper, rather than strengthen it.
What Additional Features Does the Source Have?
Scholarly publications may also include an abstract, tables and/or charts that display research results, sections dividing the article (such as “Method” and “Results”), and a listing of works cited. Scholarly articles are also likely to be longer than popular articles and to appear in journals that are published less frequently than popular ones, although though this is not always the case. Some scholarly articles and books follow other academic styles (e.g., MLA or Chicago style) that may use footnotes or endnotes for the citations, so the lack of a “Works Cited” section does not necessarily indicate that something is not scholarly.
Some scholars in the humanities rely heavily on popular sources for their scholarly work, such as the article “Girl Power's Last Chance? Tavi Gevinson, Feminism, and Popular Media Culture” (Keller, 2015). It focuses on a magazine created by an online fashion blogger, so it draws heavily on nonscholarly sources, but the author uses these sources as texts to be analyzed critically rather than as authoritative voices that lend credibility to the argument.
Evaluating Sources
Whether a source is popular, scholarly, primary, secondary, tertiary, or in the gray area between categories, it is vital that you consider the credibility of the information presented, specifically in relation to your research project. Many popular sources report scientific studies, and their reporting might be factually accurate but incomplete. Additionally, scientific studies, while likely to be credible, will be shaped by the authors' biases and assumptions. Thus, we encourage you to read all sources critically, even those that appear in academic journals and books. In the following sections, we outline some guidelines for evaluating sources you might encounter.
Much of the popular press is a for‐profit industry. Magazines and newspapers exist to make money. To a great extent, this objective shapes editors' decisions about what to include, what to exclude, and how to present what they publish. For this reason, there are popular print publications that focus on specific issues (such as Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone) to increase sales. Additionally, publications target specific audiences. So, although the National Review and Mother Jones cover similar issues, the former generally targets a more conservative audience and the latter a more liberal one. Because of differing audiences, then, articles about the same topic might offer slightly different information or reveal different biases.
A for‐profit status also affects the way authors present information in an article. Editors want to catch the attention of readers, so they will place the most sensational or provocative information in the headline or first paragraph. This structure is called pyramid writing, and journalists use it because they know that most people won't read to the end of the article. If 100% of readers read the headline, about 70% will read the introductory paragraph, and only 50% will read through to the fourth paragraph (O'Connor, 2002, p. 117). Therefore, qualifications that some results do not reinforce a certain conclusion, or that more research is needed to confirm a hypothesis, may receive only brief mention and appear at the end of the article.
Because of the desire to provoke readers and sell more issues, popular sources can sometimes publish pseudoscience. What is pseudoscience? Etymologically, the word means “fake science”; however, it is not subject to a simple or easy definition. For example, you cannot merely state that real science is neutral and objective whereas pseudoscience is biased and subjective. Nor can you argue that real science always follows the scientific method, but that pseudoscience is sloppy. And you also cannot argue that pseudoscience results from a specific political agenda, and real science is separate from politics. So, what makes some studies “fake” and others “real”?
There are some guidelines you can use to determine whether a study is pseudoscience. In pseudoscience, as with science, you want to evaluate the content of a study and the publication in which the study appears. If you can determine that the study is published in a scholarly source,