Evaluation of Sources - A How to Guide: Magazine

While most academic research is better done using articles from scholarly/academic journals, magazine articles can also be of use in a variety of situations. For example, a research paper that aims to compare and contrast conservative and liberal viewpoints on immigration reform in the United States would most likely rely heavily on articles published in magazines that reach a broad audience rather than just an academic audience. There are numerous publications that cater to particular political leanings, both conservative and liberal, and having little or no political bent. For example, the magazine National Review covers a multitude of topics of current interest and addresses them from a conservative perspective; the magazine American Prospect covers topics of current interest from a liberal perspective; while the magazine Christian Science Monitor generally takes an unbiased approach in its articles. The researcher looking to contrast the conservative and liberal stances on immigration reform would want to compare articles and editorials published in the National Review and American Prospect and similar magazines in order to get a feel for the differences in opinions surrounding this issue.

Magazines are also excellent sources for locating reviews of books, movies, drama, concerts, music, etc. While scholarly journals also publish book reviews for academic publications, magazines like Publishers Weekly and Booklist are more likely to provide broad coverage of publications in a variety of genres ranging from the very scholarly and academic to the popular. Journals like The Musical Quarterly will provide in‐depth analysis of keyboard techniques in Beethoven sonatas, but magazines like Billboard and Rolling Stone will provide up‐to‐date reviews of the latest album release by the British group Coldplay.

A political science scholar who is researching the impact of the popular press on voting behavior in the last presidential election will need to include newspapers and magazines as source materials for the research. Scholarly analysis of voting will certainly play a big role in the research, but, in order to analyze the popular material that the average voter might have been exposed to, the researcher will need to survey articles that were published in magazines like Time, Newsweek, and the National Review and in newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post.