Why We Should Evaluate All Sources
How an individual reasons from evidence to claims to arguments is often influenced by both rational and emotional factors, elements of one’s identity, and values and belief systems. Only by keeping your personal biases in check can one truly begin to evaluate information for credibility.
We live in a world where information comes from anywhere, at anytime, written by anyone, for any reason. That's why it's so important to know how to evaluate sources.
Librarians at Marshall University created the following source evaluation checklist to help you stay on track. Use it to evaluate any sources to ensure the information you're using is appropriate and trustworthy.
Personal steps
Identify emotions attached to topic.
Find unbiased reference sources for proper review of topic (such as Credo Reference).
Intellectual courage to seek authoritative voices on topic that may be outside of thesis.
Source steps
Authority established. Does the author have education and experience in that field?
Purpose/Point of view of source. Does the author have an agenda beyond education or information?
Publisher? Does the publisher have an agenda?
List of sources (bibliography). Is the evidence sound?
Year of publication. Does the year of publication effect the information?
...we have a sample Google search and a sample library database (EBSCO) search using the same search phrase: "climate change it not real."
Note that both platforms present factual information and credible resources, despite the search phrase indicating that the user is suspicious of the facts surrounding global warming.
It may be impossible to know, so:
The internet is a great place to find both scholarly and popular sources, but it's especially important to ask questions about authorship and publication when you're evaluating online resources.
If it's unclear who exactly created or published certain works online, look for About pages on the site for more information, or search for exact quotations from the text in Google (using quotation marks) to see if you can find other places where the work has been published.
Click on the above link to visit UCBerkeley's guide on how to effectively evaluate webpages to use as sources in your research project. (First, check with your professor to make sure you are allowed to use webpages as sources.)
*Internet sources are very different from the library database's scholarly sources, which are accessed online via the library's homepage.
Marshall University Libraries pays for online databases so that students, faculty, and staff can access credible information for free. Nearly all of the information in the library databases is not available on the internet (or, if it is available, you will likely be asked to pay money to access it).