Knowing about the information cycle can help you make more informed decisions about where you might look for information and what kind of information may be available on a topic.
It's important to know that library databases contain academic and non-academic sources, which may be surprising to you as college student who is often asked to use databases. Databases house content that is not found for free online, and while a lot of scholarly sources are behind paywalls, news and magazine content is also not always free. Because it takes time to create academic content, when a new topic emerges, such as the outbreak of a disease, news and magazine content may be the best or only places to find information initially, so it is important for college libraries to provide a mixture of source types.
Explore "...the differences between popular and scholarly sources in the context of the information cycle" in the video below.