Skip to main content

Comparing Information From Books Versus From Journal Articles: Home

When you research, you usually need both books and journal articles. Different kinds of information are available in the two formats, and they each present the information differently.

Comparing Information from Books Versus From Journal Articles

When you do research, you typically search for both books and journal articles. The reason you generally need both is that they present different kinds of information, at different levels of detail, and in different ways. Here is a side-by-side comparison.

Books     Journal Articles
Hundreds of pages     Generally 5-30 pages. 
Cover a bigger part of the topic     Cover a small, specialized sub-topic
Take longer to get published (1-2 years for scholarly books)     Information is more recent. Take a few months to a year to get published
Information was gathered and put together over a greater amount of time, allowing a longer-term look at the topic.     More up-to-date information, but more chance that errors have slipped through or long-term implications were unforeseen. 
A look at the wider topic. Depending on how long the book is and how the chapters are organized, it still may be a deep analysis with lots of detail.      A very deep and detailed look at a very narrow slice of a topic. Less context.
Books are published individually. They may be re-published as new editions.     Articles all relating to one subject but written by multiple authors are published together in issues of a journal.
Find books by searching WorldCat (for print books in local libraries) or the Ebook Catalog (for ebooks from the Empire State College Online Library)     Find articles by searching in the databases. Locate databases on your topic by going to Resources By Subject.

Your Librarians

Librarian SWM's picture
Librarian SWM

Please note: If you need to request accommodations with content linked to on this guide, on the basis of a disability, please contact Accessibility Resources and Services by emailing them at Disability.Services@esc.edu.  Requests for accommodations should be submitted as early as possible to allow for sufficient planning. If you have questions, please visit the Accessibility Resources and Services website https://www.esc.edu/accessibility.

Contact:
(800) 847-3000 x2222

Normal Hours
- Sun: 1 p.m. - 9 p.m.
- Mon-Thu: 9 a.m. - 9 p.m.
- Fri: 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Summer Hours
(Memorial Day - Labor Day)
- Sun: 1 p.m. - 5 p.m.
- Mon-Thu: 9 a.m. - 7 p.m.
- Fri: 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Winter Break Hours
(End of Fall 1 - beginning of Spring 1)
- Sun: Closed
- Mon-Thu: 9 a.m.-7 p.m.
- Fri: 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.

(Christmas week 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.)

Search our FAQ or email us a question
https://subjectguides.esc.edu/booksversusarticles
subjectguides.esc.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-29
32104
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UD76373UOVC2ITECMPJX2S4AHBJCUGEA
<urn:uuid:3bfae509-7059-4859-bc24-d4f8e95188b9>
2020-07-06T21:15:44Z
54.88.35.99
text/html
sha1:RBQELK73ZT3YY2UGTJX2VA4W7SI5PRJU
<urn:uuid:5884c235-b6cd-426e-ace5-9df0a59db258>
https://subjectguides.esc.edu/booksversusarticles
response
<urn:uuid:4bc95c01-863f-4c6a-b9c8-268c05fd02ff>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-29
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-134.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/