One good source for reliable information written by professionals is a professional journal. A professional journal is like a magazine, but the articles are written by researchers about the work they are doing. The disadvantage of professional journal articles for student research purposes is that some of them are too technical and require too much background in the field before they are understandable. These articles are written for a professional audience.
But not all journal articles are too difficult for students. The particular article you are to read for next class is not too difficult, except maybe here and there when it uses some statistical jargon that can be skipped over.
Compare what this article says to what we observed in class when we looked at the ads. If the article seems wrong, maybe it is now out of date. Or maybe the ads that were brought to class were not typical. Reading this article will bring out some things we did not talk about or notice in class. That's what it is supposed to do.
This article is located in what is called an online database of copyrighted articles from published professional journals. Part of your tuition money goes to pay for a subscription to the database, via Milner Library. So, to read the article, you could go to Milner Library and find it on the shelves, but you don't have to make the trip, since the article is one of many thousands that are in the online database. From a computer on the ISU network (such as ResNet), you can simply
click here
to access the article. (If you are coming in over a computer not on the ISU network, it probably won't work, but give it a try anyway and see if it asks you for your ulid and ISU e-mail password. If it does, then it should work.)
Clicking above takes you to a summary page in the database. To see the actual article, look near the top of the summary page, where there is a link to a PDF copy of the article. By clicking there, you will download the article. You have to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on the machine in order to open the article copy. The article is 1 Mb in size.
The article is not that difficult to read, and you should find it somewhat interesting. It is, however, 18 pages long. I strongly urge you to print it out. It is very hard to read material that long on a computer screen. You might not get through the whole article, but you should give it a good try.
Notice how a good professional article includes plenty of information about what sources the authors relied on.