SCOM 1000: Human Communication

Evaluating Nonscholarly Sources

If you are looking at nonscholarly articles (magazine articles, newspaper articles, even websites or blog posts), it is important that you learn more about the publication in order to evaluate the argument of an article. 

In Academic Search Complete (and other databases), the name of the journal/magazine/publication is often a link. Clicking on that link will give you a little more information about the publication.

For more information, try looking up the publication's title (or the organization it is connected with) in Wikipedia or elsewhere. That will tell you much more about the publication, and will give you a better idea of their sociopolitical stance and their intended audience.

Don't just trust an organization's About page -- do some extra research in order to assess the stance of the publication. 

All publications will have some sort of bias. You want to get a sense of what a given publication's inclination is in order to assess the article's value to your project.

Current Magazine Databases at GSU

These are stand-alone databases that contain the full archives of each of these magazines up through the most current issue available.

Other Magazines

The library provides access to many other news-oriented magazines that may be useful to you. These will be included in various databases, but the library's catalog can help you get directly to them.

Examples include, but are not limited to: (links will take you to library catalog page with access information)

Databases that will include citations from relevant magazines include:

Databases that Include Magazines

These databases will include articles from current/recent magazines.

Select "Magazines" in the left-hand menu of search results to limit a search to just magazine articles.