 This tutorial will help you learn about the information cycle and why it's important to consider when researching. When new discoveries are made or a major event happens and affects a community, information about the events and discoveries are shared with the world through publications. Publishing means to make information available to the public and can refer to activities such as a reporter sharing her observations about an event or a professor writing a research paper for a scholarly journal. Different types of publications have different audiences and different deadlines. Because of this, publications vary in terms of depth and breadth of coverage, as well as the amount of time publishers give authors to gather and review facts. The way that information changes over time through different publication formats is known as the information cycle. Let's look at the information cycle using Hurricane Katrina as an example. When an event happens, the first publications with information about it are websites, as well as television and radio programs. Newspaper articles are published soon after. At this point, information known about the event is probably limited. Details may still need to be confirmed, information may be sketchy, and more time might be needed to understand the causes and impacts of the event, given a little more time and a deadline that may be once a month instead of once a day. Authors of magazine articles write articles with more detailed information using a greater variety of sources. Then, over a period of several months or more, academics and scholars research particular aspects of an event. For example, a history professor might research the Ninth Ward in New Orleans and then write an article about the relationships between the district's history and the effect of Katrina on that community. Scholarly articles usually spend another few weeks or months undergoing an editing process known as peer review before they're published. With even more time to write and research, other authors will write books about the event. The information cycle may be easy to understand, but it doesn't always happen in a linear way. An expert may publish an article in a scholarly peer review journal, and then the results of that study may become popular news. In one example, researchers gathered data over several years about how much New Orleans was sinking. The authors, who were professors, reported their findings in a scholarly peer review journal called Nature. CNN then published a piece about that journal article. So the information cycle isn't always linear, such as when research results become popular news, or research findings from one study inspire further scholarly research. So why is the information cycle important? Knowing the cycle will help you know what information you can successfully find on a topic. Let's say you had to write a paper on Hurricane Katrina just weeks after it happened. At that time, you would have been able to find information published in websites, newspapers, and magazines because these publications focus on recent information. However, you would have found very little if any information in scholarly peer review journals, because journal articles require months if not years of research. If you ever need a peer review journal article about a recent event, you may need to change your search to look for a peer reviewed article about a similar event that happened several years earlier, and then compare the two events as best as you were able. It's also useful to think about the limitations and strengths of each publication type. Newspapers, magazines, and television and radio programs publish information quickly, but these writers usually don't have much time to consider the information in depth before their deadlines. Scholarly journal articles and books are not published quickly. However, these writers have much more time to gather information from various sources or experiments. With more time and more information, authors of journal articles and books can offer a rich and multifaceted evaluation of a topic. Thanks for watching. Hopefully this video will make your own research easier. Remember, the library has many online article collections for you to use, so if you have any questions, just ask a librarian. We're here to help.