Authoritative And Popular Sources Essay

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Essay on Authoritative and Popular Sources in Discipline In my Athletic Training Major, many people have trouble selecting and understanding if a certain source is credible or unreliable. For research, many use either authoritative or popular sources to retrieve their information. Davy Gibbs (2016) defined authoritative sources to be “sources that are the most believable and usually written by an expert or a professional in a field of study.” The University of British Columbia defined popular sources as, “sources that are usually opinionated and written by a journalist or editor” (UBC, 2015). I decided to do some research myself to find out which source is the most credible, and best to use when writing a research paper. I feel it is important to know which sources are best because many sources could lie by producing false information. I am doing this research to figure out what sources are best for me, and also for the fact of helping people know which sources are the most credible and reliable for research.
Literature Review After researching and reading through my …show more content…

Popular sources are less credible and mostly used for entertainment. From my research, I learned that popular sources are “more informal and broad” (UBC, 2015). Although the facts and information may sound correct, some of the information may be false. Popular sources are written to make someone interested in a certain topic. Like this excerpt from the Time Magazine article, “The Science of Peak Human Performance,” one can see how informal the language and vocabulary is. In the article about human performance, the author states, “The science of ultimate human performance has a bad name–literally. Flow is the term used by researchers for optimal states of consciousness, those peak moments of total absorption where self vanishes, time flies, and all aspects of performance go through the roof” (Kotler,

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