Information literacy: Introduction

In this section you will learn about publications. What is academic communication? What makes a publication ‘academic’?

First we will look at the types of academic literature, which can be divided into primary and secondary sources (see the relevant chapter), and at how academic literature is fundamentally different from popularized literature and professional/trade literature. You can find information on this in the chapter ‘Academic Literature’.

After that, we will look at scholarly (or academic) communication. This lies at the heart of academic literature, since academics communicate through academic articles, conference papers and other academic publications.

The publishing process for these publications often involves ‘peer review’, a process in which other academics in the same field assess the information to check that it meets the requirements for an academic publication. (See the chapter on peer review.)

Academic literature is published in different forms. These are discussed in the chapter ‘Types of Literature’.