Publication types and information seeking

Publication types

When scientific information is published, a scientific article, book or conference paper is usually written. These are types of publications.

All disciplines consider scientific articles important.
An article is peer-reviewed before it is accepted for publication in a scientific journal (peer-review).
An article can be a research article or a review article.
Articles are published in scientific journals compiled into databases. Articles are searched from databases.

Conference papers are short articles published in connection with scientific conferences.
They usually present the newest information in research.
Their publication is generally much less regulated than scientific articles, and therefore the prestige and use of conference papers as scientific sources varies. However, there are major discipline-specific differences here: in IT sciences, for example, conference articles are a key publication type.
Recognizable by the words proceedings and conference.

Publication practices vary in different fields of science. The publication practices of your discipline determine what kind of sources you need.

You can check the databases of your own discipline and more information related to the topic on the Resources by subject page.