Evaluating Sources

Bring up the relevant source in your web browser or have the print copy before you.

Identify important information such as:

• The title of the source document
• The name of the author
• The name of the publisher
• The name of the journal, newspaper, website, or magazine

Search the source’s title using a search engine. You may want to use quotation marks around the title in your search to ensure that you find information specifically related to your source.

Has anyone raised concerns about your source? If so, look for assessments of your source on a few of these websites: Wikipedia, NPR, Snopes, Politifact, SciCheck, FactCheck.org, and Washington Post Fact Checker. Wikipedia also has a list of fact-checking websites about political and non-political subjects.

What they discovered may make you immediately distrust the source and rule it out. But their reviews of your source—or lack of a review–may be positive enough to keep you evaluating it.

Next, look for other websites’ assessments of your source among your search results.

To see what others say about a journal article, see if it has been cited elsewhere. Some tools track where journal articles (and some conference papers and books) are being cited. Scopus and Web of Science are two library databases that do this. Google Scholar also does this. A few cautions:

• New content hasn’t had a chance to get cited.
• Some subject areas may use certain formats more than others (books may get more citations in math than in physics, for example).
• Citing something doesn’t equal agreeing with it.
• Different subject areas have different citation levels. Areas like medicine or physics articles tend to get more citations than history or literature articles, for example.
• Some journals’ items get cited more because of their reputation, but that doesn’t mean other titles have bad content.

Figure out who the source was created for. Ask yourself whether it was written as:

• A popular source for everyone
• A substantive popular source created for educated people or those very interested in the subject
• A professional source created for members of a particular profession
• A scholarly source aimed at scholars and others who want a deep view of a subject

You can often get fast clues to what kind of source it is. For instance, the URL may tell you the source was published in an online version of a newspaper or magazine.

If you searched for the source in Google Scholar or a library database, your source is likely a professional source or a scholarly article in a research journal. However, be cautious here because sometimes student papers can be found through Google Scholar, and these may not have the quality that academic writing requires.

Wikipedia may tell you whether your source is a magazine, newspaper, journal, etc. For instance, see what Wikipedia says about Men’s Health, Investopedia, and Cell. Library catalogues can also tell you about sources, as these OSU Libraries full catalogue entries do about Athletic Business and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

In general, substantive popular sources, professional sources, and scholarly sources are more credible than popular sources. That’s because publishing these sources often involves processes that help ensure their accuracy, such as editorial oversight, fact checking, and peer review. (You still need to evaluate them, but it tends to be easier.)

Now search for the author’s name, the publication, and the publisher.

Finding information about authors

Authors and publishers can be individuals, organizations, companies, or government agencies.

If your source is online, you may see a hyperlinked author name. Click on that to see if you can get more information about the person. Sometimes, you may see information about them at the bottom of the source. If it’s a scholarly journal, book, or conference paper that you are examining, you will often see their affiliation (where they work) – often a university, research lab, museum, or some other institution with experts. Databases like Scopus and Web of Science also allow you to look up authors and see their research profiles (just be careful to get the right person – some names are very common!).

Don’t be automatically impressed with Ph.D. or M.D. degrees. A Ph.D., M.D., or other advanced degree is not automatically a marker of someone you can trust about the information in your source.

Ask yourself whether their academic degree makes sense with the subject matter they are writing about. Someone with a Ph.D. in chemistry, for instance, may not know anything about criminology and whether sentencing guidelines should be changed for Americans convicted of a crime.

University credentials are not the only thing that could matter. An author may have substantial life experience or training that makes them an authority on your research question. For that reason, for example, a comparatively uneducated person who has lived for many years in a rural county may be able to provide you with information about what that’s like that is just as credible as what a university professor of rural sociology can provide.

Finding information about publications

Search the name of the publication (i.e., journal title, newspaper title, website title) to see what others say about this publication source.

You may learn that a research article is published in a predatory journal. These journals prey upon researchers’ need to publish research, but they have lower review standards. An article published in one of these sources may not be as credible as those published in more credible peer-reviewed journals.

You may also learn that a newspaper or website has a particular political bias or agenda. Keep this in mind as you evaluate your source.

Finding information about publishers

You may find the publisher’s name next to the copyright symbol, ©, at the bottom of at least some pages on a site. In books, the publisher’s identity is traditionally on the back of the title page, with a few sentences about the author on the back cover or the flap inside the back cover. (But, of course, remember that those comments are those that the publisher decided to publish.)

If your source is a website, sometimes it helps to look at the source’s URL to determine whether it belongs to a single person or a reputable organization. Because many colleges and universities offer blog space to their faculty, staff, and students who use the university’s web domain, this evaluation can require deeper analysis than just looking at the address. However, personal blogs may not reflect the official views of an organization or meet the standards of formal publication.

Ask yourself whether your results in the previous steps give you a reason to suspect that the author or publisher may have a bias or an agenda related to the topic of your source.

If so, your source may still be acceptable, depending on your research question. However, you should be aware of the potential bias of the source because it’s part of the context of the conversation around that source.

In addition, if you end up using and citing such a source, you may want to couch your language about it in your final product, as in “These authors say X about Y, although one has to keep in mind what might be their political bias.” That way, your instructor will know that you are aware of the whole conversation so far about this source, which always counts as a positive.

The more you know about the author and/or publisher, the more confidence you can have in your decision about credibility.  Sites that do not identify an author or publisher are generally considered less credible for many purposes, including for research papers and other high-stakes projects. The same is true for sources in other formats, including videos and print.

Go back to your source and start reading or viewing it, engaging in the argument the author is trying to make. Identify major statements of fact the author makes and then check a few of them out. Keep track of what others have said about your source’s statements of fact so that you get an idea of how well their ideas are accepted by others.

Remember, though, that if your source is especially innovative, not everyone may agree with its statements of fact, and it could still be a credible source. You’ll have to use your own critical thinking skills about the topic and your research question as you consider your course’s credibility here.

For example, this New York Times story covers how long and hard two Australian medical researchers had to work to convince other doctors that a bacterium, rather than stress, causes most stomach ulcers—one even infected himself with the bacterium to cure the resulting ulcer with a drug. In the story, a former dean of the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine states that peer review “tends to adhere to things that are consistent with prevailing beliefs and models,” and “really new ideas usually just get thought of as crazy.”

The difficulty that innovative researchers face is reflected in the fact that the Australian researchers identified the bacterial cause of ulcers in 1979, but it wasn’t until 2005 that they received a Nobel Prize for the importance of that discovery and their persistence in convincing other doctors.

Although the lateral reading process may take time, you will get faster as you practice. As we confront the impacts of misinformation in society, learning to evaluate information sources is a fundamental skill that you should learn.