Types of information
Information is everywhere; a quick internet search on your assignment topic is likely to bring up thousands, or even millions, of results. The quality of this information will vary and you will need to decide whether or not it is suitable to use for your assignment. A good starting point is to understand the different types of information available and how this affects whether they are suitable to use when writing an assignment.
This section explores:
The difference between popular and scholarly sources of information
Information types and what you need to be aware of when using different sources
How information is created and the information cycle
Sources of information
When should you use a book and when might a journal article be more appropriate? Can you use Wikipedia to do research? Are you allowed to use AI tools and if so how? The links below explore different sources of information, and consider how they might be useful to you when researching for assignments.
Popular vs. scholarly sources
One of the challenges when finding information for your assignments, is making sure you use the right sources. Most (but not all) assignments will require you to use scholarly sources, but what does this mean, and how can you tell if information is 'scholarly'?
Scholarly sources:
are usually written by experts in their field and then reviewed by other experts before they are published (this process is called 'peer-review')
present findings based on academic research
include academic books and peer-reviewed journal articles
Popular sources:
are written or created by non-experts, such as journalists or social media users
are made to entertain their reader, present a point of view, or sell a product
include newspaper and magazine articles
This short video from University of South Australia explains the difference between popular and scholarly sources of information.
Information flow
When thinking about what information to use and how to use it, it can be helpful to consider where information comes from: who created it and where it was published.
Some sources of information are created immediately after an event (such as tweets and TV interviews), whilst others take months or years to be published (e.g. books and journal articles). When and where information was published or generated can affect how reliable, or trustworthy, it is. A tweet posted seconds after an event is likely to be less reliable than a peer-reviewed journal article.
Watch the video to see how information flows, and how popular and scholarly sources are created.
Watch this video to see how information is created and how it 'flows'.
Evidence-based practice – levels of evidence
Evidence-based practice – levels of evidence
If you are studying on a course that includes (or leads to) occupational practice, it is important to understand that evidence underpins not just what you’ll study at UEA but also what you’ll do when you join your profession. So, if you are studying Medicine, Health, Education, Business Management, Law, or many other sciences or social sciences, you will want to know about levels of evidence (sometimes called hierarchies of evidence).
Levels of evidence are an attempt to organise the different types of research into a hierarchy with the most reliable and robust evidence at the top. However, there are different ways of categorising research, proposed by different researchers. Watch the video to learn more and start thinking about the types of research you encounter and which you’d put at the top of a hierarchy of evidence.