This document provides guidance on distinguishing between popular, scholarly, and substantive news/general interest sources. It outlines characteristics of each type of source such as appearance, intended audience, purpose, citation of sources, and more. Students are then instructed to analyze three provided information sources in groups and determine if each source is popular, scholarly, or somewhere in between and if it could be used in a history paper based on these characteristics without reading the full text. The document concludes by pointing students to online library databases and research guides for conducting further secondary source searches.