As you move forward with your research, you'll need to evaluate the sources you find, to determine if they are reliable, valid and useful for your paper. This is true for every source you find, but especially crucial for sources that you find on the open web.
The first step in evaluating a source is to assess whether it is relevant to your topic: whether its information will help answer your research questions. When you find a source that appears to be relevant, the next step is to assess the source's quality.
One method you can use to evaluate the quality of sources is to consider them in terms of Authority, Bias and Currency (ABC).
To effectively support your writing, the information you find will need to be authoritative. To evaluate the sources you find for authority, ask yourself these questions:
If you can't readily identify the author or organization behind your source, or you can't determine that they have qualifications or expertise related to the topic, you may want to look for a more authoritative source.
Some of the information you encounter in your research may be biased-- it's important to be aware of possible biases when deciding whether and how to use that information in your paper. To evaluate your sources for potential bias, ask yourself these questions:
Sources with bias can still be useful for your research; for example, they can help you lay out arguments which you'll either support or challenge with evidence. But it's important to distinguish fact from opinion, and be aware of the biases your sources may have.
For many topics, it will be important to have up-to-date information. To evaluate your sources for currency, ask yourself these questions:
Some topics may be less dependent on current information than others; and older information can sometimes be used to provide a historical perspective. But for topics having to do with quickly-changing areas like politics, technology and media, keep a close eye on your sources' currency.
Check your ability to apply the ABC test to evaluate sources by taking this quick quiz!
Professional fact checkers don’t just look at the source they are reading to verify if it can be trusted. They do something known as lateral reading, which means investigating and verifying the source you are reading by:
You should do lateral reading when trying to determine if a source is valid and unbiased. You will definitely want to investigate a source before you use it in your paper or post it to your social media outlets.
To start your “investigating,” begin with the source you are thinking of citing and see if you can find out about the author and the website creators. Some helpful questions to ask are:
You can also go to the original sources that are being cited in a work to support the arguments and research.
After you are able to answer these questions and go to the source of a claim, you can continue to read laterally to find out what other people have said about the topic. This means that you would want to pull up other credible sources by different authors on the same topic and to see if the information being provided is similar to your original source.
In many cases, claims have already been fact-checked. Some places to look at are Wikipedia, Snopes, PolitiFact, and NPR’s own Fact Check website. These sources are nonpartisan and nonprofit websites that try to increase public knowledge and understanding by fact checking claims to see if they are factual or inaccurate or biased.
By doing lateral reading, you are checking whether the information in your source is confirmed or validated elsewhere and if the author has solid credibility. This form of external validation is a great complement to the ABC (authority, bias, currency) method which evaluates a source’s author and content.
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