Library Resources for a General Audience
Click on the buttons below for access to general audience reference sources from Oakton Library databases.
Credo Reference is an excellent, encyclopedic source for background information on all topics.
Statista provides business, marketing, demographic, and economic statistics along with infographics, company/industry dossiers, market analytics, and forecasts.
Each issue of CQ Researcher examines a single "hot" topic with comments from experts, lawmakers and citizens on all sides of every issue. Includes charts, graphs and sidebar articles -- plus a pro-con feature, a chronology, lengthy bibliographies and a list of contacts.
Opposing Viewpoints covers contemporary social issues with content structured to promote critical-thinking skills. It contains reference book titles, pro and con viewpoint articles, and a variety of periodicals, podcasts, reviewed Web links, images, statistical tables, charts, and graphs.
Nexis Uni features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources with an interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Popular Sources
Popular resources are written for a large, general audience, and are easily accessible to the public, often free of charge. Popular resources are written to inform, persuade, or entertain their audiences. These sources often answer factual questions like who, what, where, when, why, and how. When you are looking for information about current events, they are a great resource. Some examples of reputable popular resources include:
A few things to remember about popular sources:
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Popular resources often may not cite their sources.
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Some popular resources are produced by organizations which have an agenda and want you to be persuaded to look at a given topic in a particular way.
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Popular sources can contain opinion/editorials, and news articles. These two types of articles offer very different kinds of information.
Popular, Professional, and Peer-reviewed
Opinion versus News
It is important to differentiate between opinion articles and news articles. Here's how to tell them apart!
Opinion:
- Promotes a single viewpoint.
- May use "I" or "We."
- More personal tone.
- Labeled as: opinion, editorial, review, or analysis.
- Presents a variety of viewpoints.
- Contains verifiable facts.
- Uses "they" or "them."
- Attributes opinions to sources, "he/she said."