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Your assignment for PSYC 101 at Kenyon asks you to find one popular source and at least 3 primary sources, all on the same topic. You may also use secondary sources and reference works for background information. By now you should know what kind of sources are popular, primary, and secondary. (if you don't, review the lesson on popular vs. scholarly sources) Here are some hints on where to go for your specific sources...
Normally you would go to the PSYCINFO database to find articles on most (but not all) psychology topics. However, you will not find popular magazines listed in the PSYCINFO database because it has only scholarly material indexed in it.
To find popular articles on a variety of possible psychology topics, browse through magazines in the library, bookstore, or elsewhere. Time, Psychology Today, Newsweek, Omni, The New York Times, Columbus Dispatch, and Discover, are all magazines/newspapers that regularly have psychology-related articles aimed at a general audience. You can often search the websites of certain publications by topics (e.g., search for articles with the keyword "prozac" or "visual perception" on the New York Times website).
Another strategy is to search the web using keywords related to topics you might want to explore. There are thousands of websites relevant to psychology, and most of them would fall into the "popular source" category. If you are having trouble deciding whether a website is a popular source, consult a librarian or your instructor, and/or review the lesson on evaluating website information.
If you have a specific topic you want to write about and you want to find a popular article on that topic, there are a few databases available online that will be useful. Periodical Abstracts and Index to Journal Articles will have a combination of scholarly and popular articles, and there will be many listings on psychology topics.
In your library instruction workshop you will learn how to search the PSYCINFO database to find articles on psychology topics. You might try these steps to find primary research articles:
For secondary sources to use as background reading on your topic, you could start by doing a search on the regular library online catalog (CONSORT). Remember that you will mainly find books listed in CONSORT, and these will almost always be secondary sources.
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