What is a professional source?

What is a professional source?

Trade or professional sources are written for an audience of professionals in the field. They may resemble scholarly journal articles or popular magazine / newspaper articles. Some library databases will include scholarly, popular, and trade sources, so you’ll want to be able to tell the difference between the three.

What makes something a scholarly source?

Scholarly sources are written by academics and other experts and contribute to knowledge in a particular field by sharing new research findings, theories, analyses, insights, news, or summaries of current knowledge. Scholarly sources can be either primary or secondary research.

Is CNN a secondary source?

For example, if you’re writing about how news is represented on the internet, a news site like cnn.com could be considered a primary source. However, if you’re writing about political elections, and you find an article on cnn.com that analyzes them, the article would be considered a secondary source.

What is a good academic source?

Well, a good place to start is with academic sources, also called scholarly sources. These sources can include books, academic journal articles, and published expert reports. Whatever the exact form, academic sources all have in common the fact that they are peer-reviewed.