Evaluating genealogy publications

In his article, "Summary on Genealogical Publications," Alan Smith offers some guidelines for evaluating various genealogical resources and targeting those most applicable to a particular objective. Smith suggests there are two main types of genealogical publications: "The first is very specialized and concern a unique geographical area and can hold actual documents and family tree data which mainly concern state and county locations. The other type of publication has a ‘human interest' slant for a generalized public or a "how-to" approach. Both can help, but sometimes a researcher has to stop reading "how-to" articles and start doing research."