26 Identifying the context of an academic text

Academic sources in context

Some of your college assignments will require you to use “academic” sources. By this, your professors usually mean:

• peer-reviewed articles from academic journals, also known as scholarly journals
• papers from academic conferences
• books published by scholarly publishers (or a chapter from such a book)

But just because you’ve found a source like this, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be the right source for you. In the previous chapter, you practiced deciphering the content of an academic article to figure out what it says and what it means. In this chapter, we’ll practice paying attention to clues about the context of your academic article:

• what kind of author wrote it,
• what kind of publication it appeared in,
• how recent it is,
• and what research influenced it and was influenced by it.

This will help you understand the author’s (or authors’) angle on the topic, as well as the article’s purpose, its audience, and how it fits into the broader conversation on your topic.

Example

Let’s imagine that you’re interested in how young people find and share political information. You’ve found the academic article titled “Practicing Information Sensibility: How Gen Z Engages with Online Information [new tab].” You’ve skimmed the article, and you think it makes some interesting points relevant to your ideas, some of which you agree with from your personal experience, and others you may want to raise questions about. But where did this article come from?

So, from a quick scan of the article details, you know that this article is coming from the perspective of researchers at Google, who presented this information to other folks who study human-computer interaction. This seems highly relevant to your area of interest. You consider browsing around the other papers from this conference to see what else scientists like these are saying about young people’s use of information these days.

Contextual Clues

Journal title

Previously, you read and wrote about how the title of an article can reveal what the article is going to do.

But if it’s a journal article, it also helps to pay attention to the title of the journal it was published in. A scholarly journal is like a magazine: it has a specific focus and audience, it usually publishes issues periodically throughout the year, and each issue contains different articles by different researchers that fit under the journal’s scope. This scope could be as broad as science or as narrow as clinical lipidology. The editors at that journal are only going to select articles that align with that focus, so the title of the journal your article was published in can tell you a lot about the lens your article is going to take.

For example, these are a few of the scholarly journals that have published articles about how Gen Z gets political information:

• Journal of Information Technology & Politics
• Journal of Communication, Language and Culture
• Politics & Policy
• Journal of Sustainable Tourism
• Undergraduate Journal of Law and Politics
• Muharrik: Jurnal Dakwah Dan Sosial

See how articles on one specific topic could be published in a variety of different journals? So you can ask yourself: Are you more interested in research by information scholars? Communication scholars? Political scientists? Tourism scholars? College students? Researchers outside the United States? As you’re browsing through a sea of articles on your topic, try looking for articles published in a journal that caters to your focus.

Note: While scholarly articles are often published in journals, other types of publications include magazines, newspapers, trade magazines, and newsletters. These are all periodicals, which are publications that put out new issues periodically: every week, month, quarter, or year. Whether these other periodicals are appropriate sources for your assignment depends on what kinds of information you need and the requirements of your writing project.

Author credentials and affiliations

Now let’s practice paying attention to information about a source’s author(s) to help you understand what their credentials say about your source and whether it’s the best source for your purposes.

With a scholarly journal article, the author is likely to be a professor or graduate student researcher at a college or university, or a professional researcher at a research institute. Consider this example:

Fig. 28.2. A scholarly article published in the proceedings from an academic conference. [Image Description]

What are some things we might notice about the authors of this article?

• All three researchers are at McGill University, a major Canadian university.
• One of the authors has a PhD in political science and works for a unit that studies media, and the other two are in computer science. This makes sense for a study that is looking at how political news is covered on TikTok (requires political science/media expertise) through the use of topic modeling to analyze a large dataset of TikTok videos (requires computer science expertise).

As a scholarly article, the audience for this article is other expert researchers who focus on similar topics, likely politics and social media.

When choosing your sources, you’ll want to consider the expertise of your authors. But what counts as expertise? Depending on the type of writing you’re doing (and the requirements set by your professor), in addition to citing academic studies, you might want to consider the writings of authors with different kinds of rich experience on your topic, including lived experience. What do young people who get their news from social media think of the coverage they see? What do news influencers say about how the algorithms affect their reach or coverage? What do journalists who write for traditional outlets see as the difference between what they do and how news is reported on TikTok? You might not be able to find these perspectives in the scholarly literature, so you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Date of publication

Understanding when a source was published is critical to understanding its context. But there’s no rule for what makes a source too old: it depends how you’re going to use the source. Consider:

• Could a philosophical text from 2000 years ago still shed light on today’s ethical dilemmas?
• Could a newspaper article from the early 20th century provide a contemporary account of what it was like to live under Jim Crow laws?
• Could an article on the technical limitations of artificial intelligence from 3 years ago already be out of date?

What’s important is to make sure you know how old your source is and contextualize it appropriately for your readers.

The sources it cites

You can also get a sense of a scholarly article’s context based on what sources it cites.

Usually, the introduction to a scholarly article will provide a literature review that tells you what studies it is building upon, as well as what gap in the literature it aims to fill. Reading that narrative and then finding the corresponding sources in the references or works cited section can inform you about where this particular paper fits into the broader literature on this topic.

You can also hop to the references or works cited section at the end of the paper to get a quick glance at the kinds of sources it cites. If you see a cited source that looks useful for your own topic, you could always search for it with your library’s search engine or Google Scholar.

The sources that cite it

What if you could look into the future of an article, to see the studies that came out more recently and built on its research? Sometimes, you can!

Some library databases and search engines allow you to find sources that have cited a particular article. This allows you to see more recent studies than the one you initially found. It also allows you to see if more recent research supports, contradicts, or otherwise complements the findings in the article you originally found. In addition, it can sometimes help you get a sense of how important your article is in the scholarly conversation on your topic. For example, if you have two articles, both published 10 years ago, and one was only cited 10 times, while the other was cited 1000 times, the latter article might be more important for you to consider in your own research.

Looking into the citations an article cites as well as the citations that cite it is called citation chaining.

To get a taste of this, try a search on your topic in Google Scholar [new tab]. Look for “cited by [number]” under one of the articles, and click on it to see what sources it cites.

Citation chaining is a pretty advanced research practice, so you may want to talk to a librarian for guidance as you try it out.

Wrapping up

The next time you find a journal article you might want to use as a source, make sure to look for clues beyond the article itself. The journal it was published in, the author’s credentials, the date of publication, what sources it cites, and what sources cite it are all important contextual clues for understanding your article’s lens and impact.

Image Descriptions

Fig. 28.2 Image Description. The image is a digital document featuring a conference paper title and abstract. At the top, the title “CARMA 2024” is displayed in large, stylized orange font, located next to a formal heading detailing the 6th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics at the Universitat Politècnica de València, in 2024. Beneath, the DOI link is provided. The document’s main title states, “TikTok vs. the Fourth Estate: Engagement With News on TikTok,” followed by the author names Sara Parker¹, Benjamin Steel², Derek Ruths², with their affiliations indicated by superscript numbers, linking to McGill University affiliations. Below this, citation instructions are given, formatted in a typical academic style. The abstract text follows: it explains TikTok’s method of presenting content aligned with users’ interests based on previous interactions, stressing that political networks often manifest as trending topics rather than through prominent figures. Transcribed Abstract text: In addition to content from accounts the user follows, TikTok frequently emphasizes content with similar subject matter to videos the user has previously liked. As long as a user has indicated an interest in the topic (most likely by engaging with a related video), they may see a TikTok about it despite not following anyone who has ever interacted with it. Consequently, political networks and communities do not always emerge around prominent figures like politicians or professional content creators, but rather manifest as ephemeral trending topics. Our methodological approach to studying engagement [Return to Fig. 28.2]

Fig. 28.3 Image Description. This collage is made up of three images. The first image, located at the top, left, is a detailed and intricate engraving depicting a scene inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. On the left, a group of men, dressed in robes, stand at the entrance of a cave. They appear to be gesturing toward each other, engaging in discussion. The cavern is dark with an archway, through which light is visible, casting shadows on the cave walls. In the central and right portion of the image, numerous figures are seated closely together, facing a high wall. The figures on the wall are acting out a scene with shadows and gestures, suggesting the theme of illusion versus reality. Above the crowd, there is a raised platform where smaller figures can be seen manipulating shapes in front of a light source to create shadow puppets on the cave wall. The image is rich in texture, with detailed shading and crosshatching techniques. Along the bottom of this image is faint, Latin text. The second image, located at the top, right,  is a black and white newspaper page. On the left, there is an illustration of a woman holding a document with the words “Have You Read The Appeal?” above her. Below, text indicates the publication details of “The Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper,” including editors, publishers, and multiple office locations in Chicago, St. Paul, and Minneapolis. On the right, there is a photograph of a man in a formal suit with spectacles. Below the photograph is the caption, “Hon. George B. Cortelyou” and “Chairman Republican National Committee.” The surrounding text consists of several columns of small, dense print.” [Return to Fig. 28.3]

Fig. 28.4 Image Description. The image shows a library digital catalog entry for an academic article titled “The great equalizer? Patterns of social media use and youth political engagement in three advanced democracies.” The article is authored by Michael Xenos, Ariadne Vromen, and Brian D. Loader, and published in “Information, Communication & Society” in 2014. The catalog interface displays various interactive icons and options, including buttons to “Get PDF,” “Read Online,” and a link labeled “Available Online.” A peer-reviewed label is also present. An arrow points to a grayed-out area, which is magnified to highlight a tooltip saying, “Find sources citing this.” [Return to Fig.28.4]