“It was information based”: Student Reasoning when Distinguishing Between Scholarly and Popular Sources. Amy Jankowski, Alyssa Russo and Lori Townsend. In the Library with the Lead Pipe, May 16, 2018.

We asked students to find an article and answer the following questions: Is this a popular or scholarly article? How can you tell? We analyzed student answers to better understand the reasoning used to distinguish between scholarly and popular sources. Our results suggest that framing sources as “scholarly or popular” is confusing rather than clarifying for students.