Social Sciences: Introduction to academic resources

You will be accessing a wide variety of items throughout your programme, to learn more about the subject.  Commonly used types of item are summarised below.  Some are more suitable for inclusion in your assignments than others.

Check the Evaluating Sources guide for tools to help with this decision.

Academic textbooks, usually written by subject experts, are great sources for subject overviews, theoretical underpinnings and timelines of topic development.

Books take time to be published and vary in their coverage - some are short and very specific in nature; others are encyclopedic in their coverage of a topic. 

Many textbooks are updated - known as a new edition - to reflect new developments in the understanding of the subject. 

Sometimes, subsequent editions also reflect different learning styles.  For example, the original study skills handbook (Cottrell, 1995) was heavily text-based while the 5th edition  (Cottrell, 2019) adopts a more visual approach.

Note: using the most up-to-date edition is vitally important in some subject disciplines, e.g. adult nursing, but less significant in others. 

Cottrell, S. (2019) The study skills handbook. 5th edn. London: Red Globe Press.

Pears, R. and Shields, G. (2019) Cite them right: the essential referencing guide. 11th edn. London: Red Globe Press.

Journals are published on a regular basis - weekly, monthly, quarterly - and are comprised of a selection of articles relevant to the journal's specialty.  Journals can be:

• Trade publications. 
• Aimed at employees and other practitioners.
• For those in management roles. 
• Designed to facilitate scholarly discussion and research.

Like journals, the articles appearing in them vary in purpose, style and length.  They usually provide details on:

• Current talking points/ other news updates.
• Practical applications of specific interventions.
• Best practice in specific areas, e.g. discussion or recommendations from practitioners/ experts..
• Recent research studies.
• Literature which has been published in specific fields - often reviews highlighting where further research would be beneficial.

Some articles, especially those in scholarly journals, are scrutinised by subject experts  - peer reviewed - before they are accepted for publication.  This ensures a broader, more rigourous presentation.

Statistical information is often useful to illustrate certain situations, e.g. impact of social and economic circumstances and diseases on society. 

You will sometimes see statistical information in journal articles and other sources but generally, this is not always easy to find.

In the UK, dissertations are research projects prepared by Honours or Masters level students, usually as the final assignment of their degree programme. 

Selected dissertations in some subject areas are passed to the Library for other students to use as exemplars for layout and formatting.

Theses are longer, more in-depth projects prepared by PhD students.

These are often examples of first-hand - or primary - research and can be held in a university's archive.

Note, some countries use a different match of level and description for such works.

Like journal articles, newspaper articles and other news sources vary in length and purpose.  Short updates or sensationalist stories are often not detailed enough to be considered appropriate for inclusion in academic assignments. 

Longer essay-style articles can be good introductory sources for exploring potential discussion points. 

News sources are particularly useful for illustrating economic circumstances and social attitudes.  This confirmation of circumstances at particular points in time enables analysis of social trends.