Computer Literacy

Difference between Scholarly Resource and Popular Resource
There are various times that we can hear people suggest to get on and Google the topic. Well that is definitely a great idea! Consequently, when people are researching a topic, subject of interest etc., they must decide what is valid information and invalid information. The ability to understand that comes with understanding difference between what a scholarly resource is versus a popular resource. First let us begin with the explanation of what is a scholarly resource. This resource is where one can find a collection of scholarly articles that intellectuals write about and even researchers or teachers write about in a certain field of study. Such articles are those that consist of original research conducted by those scholars and reported to the academic community (Ashford University Library, 2013).
Popular resources on the other hand are considered to be various types of resources that are read by the public, such as newspapers, magazines like Time and even websites and personal blogs. Popular resources provide information to the public and they are not considered to be scholarly nor do people pay to access a scholarly database.   In fact, no peer-review is done on the originality and validity of the information. Rather the only thing reviewed is the format and style and usually that is just to make sure that the writing appears to be that of a professional and knowledgeable writer. There are times that some of the popular resources can lend way to providing some reliability to one’s research, but one must uncover many layers in order to find it is reliable. So for what it is worth, sure popular resources offer a quick fix to answering a question or interest of a topic, but it does not relay the underlying original facts and validity of that question or questions.

“Scholarly journals are a collection of articles written by scholars or academics in a field of study, or by someone who has done...