Read the following, then go to the next box for resources to search.

To understand the difference between popular articles and scholarly ones, review the page above (Scholarly versus Popular Articles.)

Popular publications can do these things for you:

• alert you to late breaking research that you might want to mention in writing textbook material
• provide general background information before you turn to the academic journal literature;
• help identify late breaking news about important scientific discoveries or developments;
• point you to academic studies; for example, a newspaper or magazine or other popular publication may give a journalistic account of a scientific research project, mention its principal researchers, and mention the academic journal in which the research was published. You can then look up the scholarly journal article where the research was published.(You will have to assess the accuracy of the journalistic or popular accounts by turning to the research as published in a scholarly source.)

See the boxes below for databases that will help you find popular articles. 

Find at least one popular article about your topic. It can be from a newspaper or magazine, or from the open web. Make sure it looks reliable. 

See the resources below. Some tips about using them:

1.  Research Library and Academic Search Ultimate contain both popular and scholarly articles. Make sure to use the limiters/filters to restrict to which type you want.

2,  Note: if the popular article reports recent scholarly research and mentions where the research was published, that points to a scholarly article to use for the exercise. For example, you might see a phrase in the popular article that says “Researchers at XYZ University reported an exciting new discovery last week in the journal ‘ABC.’” Look for the scholarly article in the journal ABC.

Other places to check; make sure to limit your searches to the last few years.You can look these up by doing a journals search in ASA, Lehigh's online catalog on the library homeppage, or on google (with VPN on if you are off-campus).

•     Discover Magazine: "The newsmagazine of science".
•     New Scientist.
•     Science (see news)
•     Science News
•     Scientific American
•     The Scientist