What is a Popular Source?
Popular sources are written for a general audience and are intended to inform readers on a broad range of topics, such as news events, topics of current interest, and the business and entertainment worlds. Examples include newspapers, magazines, best-sellers, and consumer-oriented websites. They can be useful for getting ideas for a topic or for background information. When used to document historical events, cultural practices, or public opinion, popular sources may be valuable to researchers as primary source material.
Typical characteristics of popular sources:
- informal in tone and scope, with language that is easily understood by the general public
- often include illustrations or advertisements
- content usually written by journalists, staff writers, or free-lance writers
- do not report on original research, are not peer-reviewed, and rarely include citations
Magazines
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowMultidisciplinary - good for nearly all subjects. Scholarly and trade journals, popular magazines, newspapers, conference proceedings, book reviews, and more.
- Google MagazinesFull text magazines on a wide variety of topics digitized by Google and made freely available.
- Summon This link opens in a new windowSearches more than 300 million items - books, scholarly articles, newspaper articles, data, digital audio, digital video, digital images, government documents and more. It draws from the library catalog (OBIS), many of the full text and article indexing databases, as well as digital repositories from colleges, universities, research centers, and other open-access archives on the web.
Newspaper Databases
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowMultidisciplinary - good for nearly all subjects. Scholarly and trade journals, popular magazines, newspapers, conference proceedings, book reviews, and more.
- Nexis Uni This link opens in a new windowA wide range of news, political, legal, and business information from thousands of sources, mostly full text. Includes newspapers, magazines, wire services, federal and state court opinions, federal and state statutes, federal regulations, and SEC filings. News information is updated daily and wire services several times daily.
- Factiva This link opens in a new windowFull-text global news sources, including newspapers, newswires, television and radio transcripts, numerous regional and industry publications, and images from Reuters. Content comes from ~160 countries in 22 languages. Only 3 Oberlin users at one time.
New York Times Pass
Institutional access to the NYTimes.com is provided to all current Oberlin College students, faculty, and staff.
If you are new to campus or have not previously registered for Oberlin's institutional NYTimes access
- While on campus and connected to the Oberlin’s network, visit accessnyt.com.
- Create an account (claim a Pass) using your @oberlin.edu email address.
- You have successfully claimed a Pass when you see the Start Your Access screen.
Once registered you’ll be able to access NYTimes.com by logging into your account from any computer/tablet/device you use.
Students: when registering you will be asked for your date of graduation from Oberlin; your status will stay active through that date, with no need to reactivate/re-authenticate.
Faculty/staff: you will have to re-authenticate annually, 364 days from when you last registered/authenticated for your NYTimes.com Pass. You may not reactivate your Pass until your previous access has expired.
To reactivate your Pass:
- While on-site and connected to the Oberlin’s network, visit accessnyt.com.
- Make sure you are logged into the NYTimes.com account with which you activated your last Pass.
- You will be granted a new Pass and see the Start Your Access screen.
- The new Pass will be good for 364 days.
Please contact the research help desk with any questions - reference@oberlin.edu.