1. Common expectations for graduate and undergraduate students:

Ø Students should plan to have a minimum of one source per page of the paper. This does not mean that students cite a different source per page, but it does mean that if the assignment is an eight to ten page paper, the paper should be based on a minimum of eight to ten sources. These may be a mix of primary and secondary sources depending on the nature of the assignment.

Ø Needless to say, if the paper assignment is for an 8-10 page paper, the paper must meet the minimum (be at least eight pages) to receive anything above a "D" and if you are using footnotes rather than endnotes, should be closer to the maximum.

Ø Students should use a mixture of books and articles. Rarely is it justifiable to base a paper entirely on one of these two types of materials. Books and articles should be separated in two sections of the bibliography, with books preceding articles.

Ø Papers should have a minimum of one footnote or endnote per paragraph in the body of the paper, and if the paragraph has only one note, it should be "synthetic," meaning that it cites multiple sources that were synthesized to provide the evidence upon which the paragraph was based. Only when a primary source is being analyzed is it acceptable to base a paragraph on a single source. The reason for this is primarily that no book or article, no matter how well-done, is sufficient evidence upon which to build an argument. Students should see what several or more authors have to say about their topic and whenever possible cite more than one author to show that the information or interpretation being cited or used to support the student’s thesis is indeed valid and accepted in the field. A single historian’s work might be what a scientist calls an "outlier," meaning that it is idiosyncratic, does not fit the general trend of the data or, in the case of secondary sources, contains research or an interpretation that most historians do not accept or consider valid. A good argument is based on the most solid data possible!

Ø Secondary sources should be from peer-reviewed academic sources. University press publications and peer-reviewed journals accessed through the library are the most reliable. Websites like Wikipedia that are not edited for reliability, let alone peer-reviewed, may be a useful place to begin research but, like encyclopedias and dictionaries, are not reliable sources and should not be cited in bibliographies.

Ø Primary sources should be discussed and contextualized in the introduction of the paper and/or the annotated bibliography or an informational note. Primary sources cannot be read like secondary sources, as accurate "facts" about the time. Their usefulness relies on information about how and why they were generated, when, and by whom. They must be read even more critically than secondary sources.

2. Additional Expectations for Graduate Students:

	Graduate students are in training to become professional historians. Thus they are held to higher standards than undergraduates, standards closer to those expected of professional historians. Historians are expected to be "experts" on the material they are studying. At the doctoral level and above, that means digging as deeply as necessary (and traveling as far as necessary, or at least possible) to master all the primary and secondary sources on their topic. Although M.A. students cannot be expected to go quite that far, they are expected to read all the secondary materials they can obtain via interlibrary loan, both books and articles, as well as in our library. A good research paper at the graduate level should have a couple dozen primary and secondary sources, at least. And rather than counting sources to see whether they’ve hit a "magic minimum," graduate students should be aiming for thoroughness. They should try to get their hands on as much material as possible.
	Graduate students even more than undergraduates should be able to use "synthetic" footnotes to demonstrate that they have looked at multiple sources and interpretations of various aspects of their topic.
	Graduate students writing a thesis or a research paper based on a primary source should research that source as thoroughly as possible and discuss the nature of the source and what can and cannot be learned from it in the introduction and/or the annotated bibliography.
	Graduate students should also be able to contextualize their topics in light of the period they are researching. Thus they should have, or obtain, whatever background is necessary to understand their topic and their sources. In other words, if you are writing a paper about the "Great Terror" of the French Revolution, you will need either to have taken a course on the French Revolution or to read background material on it (or both!) before you can even begin to formulate your thesis or select your primary source.