Listed below are some general guidelines to consider when evaluating information
resources.
Is it Relevant to your topic? The title of a book or article is a good
first indication, but you often need to look further to fully evaluate relevancy.
Abstracts (brief summaries) and keywords are often provided with articles
and can usually give you a good indication of relevancy. For books you can
scan
the preface, table of contents and index of a work to get a good overview.
What is the author's purpose? Some works are clearly intended as either an
opinion piece (e.g., editorial) or an objective study ( e.g., scientific experiment).
There is, however, a vast range of literature in which an author's bias may
not be explicitly stated. Use reference sources such as citation and book review
indexes to see what else the author has published and try to determine whether
there is a discernable pattern. Noting the publisher of a work (e.g., a trade
association) may also be useful in determining purpose.
What kind of source is it? Scholarly journals ( e.g., New
England Journal of Medicine) usually contain specialized articles written by experts in a particlular
discipline, while general magazines ( e.g., Newsweek) often contain less technical
articles written by reporters or magazine staff members. Unlike general magazines,
the articles in most scholarly journals usually go through a peer review process
in which other experts in the author's discipline review the article before
it is accepted for publication.
How current is the information? The importance of currency will depend on
the type of research you are interested in. In certain scientific fields currency
is vital in order to keep up with the rapid pace of research. Currency is important
in many humanities fields as well, but it is not as vital a factor as it is
in the sciences.
What about the Internet? All of the above criteria apply when evaluating Internet
resources. In addition, you should also consider these factors when evaluating
Websites:
- Type of site: The URL domain (e.g., .edu)
tells you generally what type of site it is.
- .edu = educational
- .gov = government
- .com = commercial
- .org = organization
- Personal or Official: Is the Website officially sponsored by an organization
or is it an individuals personal site or page?
- Stability/Reliability: Remember that the Internet has neither the stability
nor the regulatory mechanisms of traditional print sources. Individual
sites and pages frequently come and go and it is relatively easy to publish
on the
Web.
- Links: Most Websites contain links to other sites that may or may not be
reliable, useful etc. Remember to apply the same evaluation criteria to all
sites regardless
of how you got there.
