Visiting Students Research Guide

Review the three sources with your small group. 

Determine which source is: 

• academic, scholarly source 
• popular source 
• op-ed/blog source

Consider: 

• Author - who is writing this piece? Are they an expert? how do I know that? 
• Purpose - why are they writing this piece? What are they trying to accomplish with this article? 
• Audience - who is this article for? 
• Citations - where did they get their information? What citations are they linking to? 
• Language - what kind of language are they using? Formal? Informal? 
• Visuals Used - are there images? graphs? Data tables?