One thing about researching, is that you should know what you are looking for. This page is to help you identify what type of resource you need but not specifics (that is what is individual pages of the subjects are for).

An Overview of Popular Culture Resources

Primary Sources: These are your subjects. This is what you write about.

Secondary Sources: These come into two different forms especially when doing popular culture: Critical (original) sources and Critical (Primary) sources.

• Critical (original) sources: These sources are going to focus on whatever your primary source is. When it comes to popular culture, more often than not, whatever you are interested in is based on something else or it has a lot in common with a piece of literature before. For example, fairy tales. You would find research on the Brother’s Grimm version, Hans Christian Anderson, or some other fairy tale chronicler.
• Critical (primary) sources: These are going to focus on your actual subject. For example, if you are researching Loki from the Marvel movies/comics or from the American God series, it would directly on this incarnation.

Encyclopedias: these are good for background research and possibly basic information on what the most popular scholarly work is.

Edited Collections: This type can be both a primary and secondary resource due to the editor. These will be collections of primary texts (like a bunch of fairy tales, myths, or short stories collected in one volume) that were put together by an editor. Sometimes, they will be annotated which will have the editor’s notes and scholarly analysis/explanation of the texts.

Edited Critical Collections: This will be a collection of articles that are focus on analyzing a primary text. They will focus on a theme like tricksters or psychoanalysis of fairy tales, or feminism in a certain group of texts.

Interviews, blogs, and magazines:  These will focus on your primary text, and because we are in an age of digitalness and feedback, these are not to be overlooked, but you must be wary on the source. Ask yourself does the interviewee have authority to make true, cannoical statements about the series or that the magazine is one that doesn’t publish trash. For example, there have been a few times that feedback from fans have changed a series (Spike from BTVS and Loki from the MCU). Sometimes actors, writers, and directors can give nice tidbits that reveal secrets of a text.

Websites: Sometimes, you use content published on a website if it has authority. Think government, school, or primary text websites. For example, Marvel recently revealed on their website and no where else, something fans have wondered for over seven years about a character that could change an analysis.

Databases: Mostly these are scholarly website resources. Almost every university/college has assess to some databases, but also regular public libraries do as well. Public Libraries have access to Galileo which, in turn, connects to others. Google Scholar, free to everyone, is also one of these.

Conferences and Scholarly Journals: Conferences are amazing resources. You can attend ones that are focused on your subject and can get feedback on your research if you present, or even find resources there. Some publish their own journals which collect scholarly work (that can appear in databases and other collections; in fact, journals are, in essence, edited collections). Conferences are expansive and so are journals. If you are lucky, some pay post copies on their websites or you can gain access through databases.

I posted something similar on a libguide that goes into more specific detail (and probably will be repeated on the Fairy Tale Page here). It focuses solely and specifically on how to help you research a scholarly paper when working on a fairy tale adaptation subject: Popular Culture: Fairy Tale Adaptation Research Guide.