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Citation Styles: Types of Information

This guide serves to provide a quick reference to various citation styles including the APA 7th edition.

Introduction to research resources

While searching for resources for your assignment/project, you may stumble upon terms like peer-reviewed, open access etc., and wonder what they mean. This guide provides some tips to help you distinguish between the different types of information. 

Types of information

  • Peer-reviewed journals are journals that have gone through review and evaluation of an editorial board of subject experts before they are accepted for publication.

 

How to search for peer-reviewed journal articles via the Library website?

While refining your search:

You may choose to refine your search to include only peer-reviewed journals by selecting the option for “Peer-reviewed Journals” on the left panel:

Here are some tips to help you differentiate between similar publications such as academic journals, trade journals and magazines. 

Similarity of magazines, trade and academic journals: Published on a regular basis.

Differences:

A database is an extensive collection of information. It could be a collection of journals, images, ebooks, news articles, or a combination of different types of resources. There are also multi-disciplinary or subject-specific databases. To access databases subscribed by the Library, please go to Library website>Resources>Filter by Format>Databases. Click on “More Info” on each database to learn about its coverage.

  • Open access resources are accessible online and free of cost or other barriers, possibly creative commons licensed to promote reuse.
  • While most conventional (non open-access) resources cover the publishing cost via subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges, open access resources are funded by a range of business models, including imposing fees on authors/sponsors.
  • In other words, conventionally, users pay to access resources, and authors get paid for their published works. For open-access resources, users do not have to pay to access, but some authors have to pay to get their works published.
  • Open access can be applied to all forms of resources, including  academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters and books.
  • Some open-access resources include:

Open-access resources are also available via the Library's subscribed databases. 

Conference papers are articles that are written with the aim of being accepted by conferences. Conferences are events that allow people of a common interest to meet, typically to share findings through verbal presentation, poster presentation or tabled discussions. Some conference papers are compiled and published as conference proceedings. Not all conference papers are published

Books and other works that contain useful facts and information. Includes dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias, almanacs and bibliographies.

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