Categorizing Sources by Type: Popular and Scholarly Sources

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A very common way that you’ll see sources categorized - especially in an academic context - is as either popular or scholarly. Neither category is better than the other, although a popular or scholarly source might be more appropriate in specific contexts. We have a whole module on popular and scholarly sources if you want to learn more about this particular way to categorize sources. 

Popular/scholarly is a bit of a binary, but sometimes you’ll also hear about a third category that goes with these: professional or trade sources. These fit somewhere in between popular and scholarly - they are often formatted similarly to popular magazines, but they are typically written for people working in a specific profession. For example, American Libraries is technically a magazine, with glossy pages, lots of images, and shorter articles; but the intended audience is pretty specific - only librarians would really be interested in this. 

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