SCI 103 -Biology -Ghaemghami: Articles

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Popular Literature vs. Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Literature: What's the Difference?

Purpose

• Academic: To communicate research and scholarly ideas
• Popular: To inform and entertain the general reader

Audience

• Academic: Scholars and students
• Popular: The general public

Scope

• Academic: Very narrow and specific subjects
• Popular: Broad variety of public interest topics, cross disciplinary

Authors

• Academic: Scholars, researchers, experts, usually listed with their institutional affiliation
• Popular: Employees of the publication, freelancers (including journalists and scholars)

Characteristics

• Academic:

1. Little or no background information given
2. Technical language and discipline-specific jargon
3. Peer reviewed
4. Bibliography/References/Citations included
5. Procedures and materials often described in detail
6. Articles are longer, often over 5 pages

• Popular:

1. Little technical language or jargon
2. Few or no cited references
3. No bibliography
4. General summaries of background information
5. Contain numerous advertisements
6. Articles are usually brief; between 1-7 pages

MEDLINE provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. Created by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE allows users to search abstracts from over 4,600 current biomedical journals.

Contains access to 320 full text science journals covering all fields of science. Offers a broad range of science literature to students on the community college level.

Provides access to 100 full text journals covering such disciplines as clinical medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system and the preclinical sciences.

Supporting high school curricula and university coursework, Science in Context features authoritative information for assignments and projects, and provides detailed coverage of popular subjects. From earth science and life science, to space, technology, mathematics and science history and biography.

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