Revised Essay Response: Web Sites & Journal Articles

Zhu Ye
LIBY1551
Revised Essay Response: Web Sites & Journal Articles

After I watched the Advanced Formats Presentation, I feel really regret that I didn’t watch this video earlier. When I was writing essays for other class, the professor always ask us to use scholarly resource to back up our claim. And list a reference in our writing; such as books, school articles and journal to support my idea. And I just search my topic and claims by Google, then find something related and linked to my essay. I cannot properly evaluate my searched website and wasted many time. There are many differences between a scholarly journal article and a website. However, I used to think that scholarly journal articles and websites are almost the same, just appear in different places. But now I have a clearly recognize that these two things are different.
For this essay, the basic question for us to answer is “What is the difference between a scholarly journal article and a website?” I don’t think this is a fair question for me about the fairness issue. I get really confused about this question. What’s the point about this question? Is it asking that web site and journal articles are different or not? Of course they are different, but they also get somewhere similarly. I don’t think this question is a good way to differentiate between the two formats fair.
As the “Advanced Formats Presentation” says that “Web sites, to some, signify ‘junk’ information.” While the “printed book, journals and newspapers, signify reliable, quality information to them”. They have similar and difference. One article can appear both in scholarly journal and website. The website and journal can offer exactly same article.
The scholarly journals’ articles are known as “peer-reviewed, academic, refereed, or professional journals”. The characters of scholarly journal can be separated from different parts. First of all, the author is researcher or scholar in the field and famous; for example, a mathematics professor in Harvard University is more expert than a primary teacher who teach math at elementary school. Secondly, the audiences are other scholars and professionals or students who familiar with the field, not people with few education. And the purpose for scholarly journals is not for commercial use or trade, but to report original research, experiment, or theories. And it cited its sources clearly in the references list.
In other words, a scholarly journal should have a nice general title and give us detail of content, such as references list; also some specific authors mentioned and affiliations with known reliable sources. We can conclude as clean authorship, a specific date, brief but fairly substantial and useful information for academic writing. Government documents can be used in scholarly journals also. Scholarly journals are some available online and they have their own web sites too. So we cannot say scholarly journals are absolutely inked and printed.
Another question for me to think about is the way that different formats manifest themselves online and does the process used to create the information in those formats change when online or in print. The scholarly article always have a simple and sententiousness look and don’t have any advertisement. But the website comes both ways, some schools have their own communication website and both professor and students upload their articles to share and revised. When we view them, it’s in HTML format (website), but when we want to download it; it has an option of document format. We can skip the mass of advertisements and only download the article. It’s a good use of website.
We need reliable information in our academic research, so we don’t need “off limits” web sites which is unsuitable and useless in our research. The website with many ads is not trustworthy for academic research. The purpose for that website is to sell stuff rather than offer you academic knowledge. Uncertain authority and very sloppy references is main characters of an “off limits” website. Blogs is important and widely used today, but we cannot use personal blogs as a college-level research source. These social networks are very easy to recognize, so you don’t want to use people’s diary in Facebook or MySpace as a support sources. But we can still find sources for academic writing in web sites. A website with a .org or .edu may more reliable than others in research. There is a link “about us” tells the information about who created this website and response for the article it posted. By checking these, we can decided if it is “off limits” or suitable for use.