Once you’ve selected the appropriate research methodology, your next task is to search for sources that can be taken seriously by your audiences and, in so doing, narrow down your topic. Research is largely a process of sorting out strong, relevant, and reliable sources from those that aren’t. Appropriately using credible sources reflects well on your own credibility, whereas using suspicious sources—perhaps because they were the top results of a Google search filtered by an algorithm informed by your search history, may show that you haven’t been concerned with quality sources and undermine your authority.

A research document full of dubious sources makes you look uneducated, lazy, flakey, or gullible at best, or at worst conniving and deceptive. We’re in an age that some have dubbed the “post-truth era” where “fake news” churned out by clickbait-driven edutainment outlets can be a major determining factor in the course of history (White, 2017). Building the critical-thinking skills to distinguish truth from lies, good ideas from bad, facts from propaganda, objective viewpoints from spin, and credible sources from dubious ones is not only an academic or civic duty but also key to our collective survival. Learning how to navigate these perilous waters is one of the most important skills we can learn in school.

College or public libraries and their online databases are excellent places to find quality sources, and you should familiarize yourself with their features such as subject guides and advanced search filters. Even libraries are populated by sources outside the realm of respectability, however, because they cater to diverse stakeholders and interests by being comprehensive, including entertainment materials in their collections. They also have holdings that are horribly out of date and only of historical interest. Whether in the library or on the open internet, the only real way to ensure that a source is worth using is to develop critical thinking skills in knowing what to look for in sorting the wheat from the chaff.

3.2.1: Assessing the Credibility of Print Sources

Developing a good sense of what sources are trustworthy takes time, often through seeing patterns of approval in how diligent professionals rely on certain sources for credible information. If you continue to see respected professionals cite articles in Scientific American and The Economist, for instance, you can be reasonably assured of those sources’ credibility. If you see few or no professionals cite Popular Mechanics or Infowars and you also see non-professionals cite fantastic, sensational, or shocking stories from them in social media, you have good reason to suspect their reliability. The same goes for sources regarding certain issues; if 97% of relevant scientists confirm that global climate change results from human activity (Cook et al., 2016), for instance, sources representing or championing the 3% opposition will be seen as lacking credibility. Patterns of source approval take time to track, but you can count on many more immediate ways of assessing credibility in the meantime.

The following indicators are worth considering when assessing print sources (and some online sources, but we will deal with them separately afterward) because they usually all align with credible sources:

• Author credentials: If the author is identified by name and credentials, you can verify whether they are expert enough on the topic to be a credible authority.
  • Generally, the higher the credential or industry position an author holds, the more credible you can expect them to be. An author with a PhD (doctoral credential) in psychology will be a credible authority on matters of psychology because they have legitimate expertise. A talk show host, on the other hand, lacks credibility and expertise on such topics since they don’t have the same years of focused study, training, and clinical practice in the field. The PhD is a more advanced credential than a master’s degree, which is more advanced than an undergrad (four-year bachelor’s) degree, which is more advanced than a college diploma or certificate, which is more advanced than a high school diploma. In the absence of more detailed information, you can roughly gauge how credible an authority someone is on a topic based on where they fall on that spectrum of education.
  • Years of successful industry experience is also a trustworthy credential. Suppose the author of a trade journal article has 35 years of experience in the industry, 20 of those as an owner of a thriving business. In that case, you can expect expert knowledge from them if their topic is on matters directly related to their profession.
  • Likewise, a blogger can only be taken seriously if they are working professionals writing about their work and shouldn’t be relied on outside of their area of expertise.
  • A blogging hobbyist might have some interesting things to say, but without expert training and credentials, their word doesn’t carry much weight. If a backyard astronomer discovers something major in the night sky, for instance, it takes verification and systematic cataloguing from credentialed astronomers employed by renowned institutions before the discovery is considered real.

• Currency: Depending on the topic, how recently the source was published can be a key indicator of credibility.
  • A book on communications technology from 1959 is no longer a relevant authority on communications because technology has changed so much since then. A 1959 writing guide such as Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, however, is mostly still relevant because we still value its advice on writing concisely and because the language hasn’t changed drastically since then. (More recent editions have dispensed with outdated advice like using masculine pronouns exclusively when referring to writers, however, since we now value writing that’s not gender-exclusive, as discussed in 2.2.1 above).
  • In technology fields generally, a source may be considered current if it was published in the past 5-10 years; in some sub-disciplines, especially in computing, currency may be reduced to more like 1-2 years depending on how fast the technology is advancing. Disciplines that advance at a slower pace may have major sources still current even after 15-20 years because nothing has since come along to replace them.

• Author objectivity: If the author argues entirely on one side of a debate on which experts disagree, be suspicious of the source’s credibility.
  • If the author identifies the other sides of a debate and convincingly challenges them with strong evidence and sound reasoning, then their work is worth considering.
  • If the author ignores the controversy altogether, summarily dismisses alternative points of view out of hand, offers dubious arguments driven by logical fallacies, simplifies complex issues by washing out any nuance, or appears to be driven more by profit motive than dedication to the truth, then “buyer beware.” Using such an extremely slanted source will undermine your own credibility.
  • Company websites, especially for smaller businesses, are generally suspect because their main goal is to attract customers and ultimately profit, so they’re not going to focus too much on information that may give potential customers reason to think twice no matter how legitimate it is. A home security alarm company, for instance, is probably not going to post crime statistics in an area that has record-low criminal activity because people will conclude that home security is a non-issue and therefore not worth spending money on. The company is more likely to sidestep rational appeal and prey instead on fears and anxieties by dramatizing scenarios in which your home and loved ones are violated by criminals. If the company website focuses on education, however, by explaining what to look for to assess the credibility of the professional you’re seeking, then you are probably looking at a successful operation that does quality work and doesn’t need to fleece you to survive.

• Publisher quality: If the source publisher is an established, long-running, big-city (e.g., New York or Toronto) or university press with a large catalogue, you can be reasonably assured that the source underwent an editorial process that helped improve its validity.
  • Run a quick background check on the publisher by looking up their website and some other sources such as Wikipedia articles via its List of English-language book publishing companies (2018) and List of university presses (2018). Since this is quick, informal secondary research, you need not document this research unless you are writing a report specifically on their credibility.
  • An editorial process means that more people besides the author reviewed the work for quality assurance before publishing.
  • A self-published (“vanity press”) book lacking that constructive criticism, however, wouldn’t necessarily have had the benefit of other people moderating the author’s ideas and pushing them toward expert consensus.
  • If the publisher isn’t a university press or operates outside of the expensive New York City zip code, however, that’s not necessarily a guarantee that it lacks credibility, but you may want to do a background check to ensure that it’s not a publisher with a catalogue of, say, white-supremacist, conspiracy theorist, or climate change-denying literature. Likewise, if you see that the source is sponsored and/or promoted by special interests like Big Oil or a far-left extremist group, for instance, your suspicions should be raised about the validity of the content.
  • See Cornell University Library’s Distinguishing Scholarly from Non-Scholarly Periodicals: A Checklist of Criteria (2017).
• Peer review: Any source that undergoes the peer-review process requires the author to make changes suggested by credentialed experts in the field called upon by the publisher. This process ensures that author errors are corrected before the text is published and hence improves both its quality and credibility.
• Writing quality: The quality of the writing is another indicator of credibility because it also suggests that the source underwent an editorial process to ensure quality and respectability.
  • A poorly written document, on the other hand, suggests that the author was alone and isn’t a strong enough writer to proofread on their own, or that no one involved in its publication was educated enough or cared enough about details to bother correcting writing errors.
  • Consider the connection between the quality of one’s writing with the quality of their thinking. If your writing is organized and well structured, abides by accepted conventions, and is error-free, your thinking tends towards all such qualities too. If someone’s writing is a mess and rife with errors, on the other hand, it often betrays a scattered and careless mind.
  • Notice that quality publications will have very few if any writing errors.

• References: If a source identifies its sources and all of them meet the credibility standards outlined above, then you can be reasonably certain that the effort the source author made towards formal secondary research ensures their credibility.
  • If the source doesn’t identify sources, however, or is vague about them (e.g., with expressions like “research shows that …,” “studies have proven that …,” or “experts say that …”), then you should question why the author hasn’t bothered to cite those research studies or name those experts. Of course, it may be because they don’t have the time and space to cite sources properly in the platform they’re writing. But it may also be because they’re lazy in their research or because they’re making it up for self-serving purposes.

3.2.2: Assessing the Credibility of Online Sources

Online sources pose special challenges to students and professionals conducting research since most will expediently conduct research entirely online where some of the above indicators of credibility must be rethought a little. Sometimes the author isn’t revealed on a webpage, perhaps because it’s a company or organization’s website, in which case your scrutiny shifts to the organization, its potential biases, and its agenda. A research project on electronic surveillance, for instance, might turn up the websites of companies selling monitoring systems, in which case you must be wary of any facts or statistics (especially un-cited ones, but even cited sources) they use because they will likely have only been selected to help sell products and services. Instead of checking the publisher as you would for a print source, you could consider the domain name; websites with .edu or .gov URL endings usually have higher standards of credibility for the information they publish rather than sites ending with .com or .org, which are typically commercial enterprises (as in the monitoring systems example above) and special interest groups with unique agendas.

Although successful in being a comprehensive repository of knowledge, Wikipedia.org, for instance, is not generally considered credible and should therefore not appear as a source in a research document unless it’s for a topic so new or niche that no other credible sources for it exist. By the organization’s own admission, “Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found [on their site].” The Web 2.0, user-generated nature of Wikipedia means that its articles are susceptible to vandalism or content changes inconsistent with expert opinion, and they aren’t improved by any formal peer-review process (Wikipedia, 2015). Wikipedia sacrifices credibility for comprehensiveness. For these reasons, a Wikipedia article in a research report is a little laughable; few will take you seriously if they see it there because you will look lazy for stopping at the first available source and picking the lowest-hanging fruit.

A Wikipedia article can be a good place to start in a research task, however. If you’re approaching a topic for the first time, use Wikipedia for a general introduction and a sense of the topic’s scope and key subtopics. (Wikimedia Commons is also a reliable source of images provided you credit them properly.) But if you’re going to cite any sources, don’t stop there; use the credible ones that the Wikipedia article cites by scrolling down to the References section, checking them out, and assessing them for their credibility using the criteria outlined above in §3.2.1.

A final indicator of credibility for online sources, similar to the writing-quality check discussed above, is the overall design quality of the website. The attractiveness of a site may be subjective, but a user-friendly and modern design suggests that money was spent relatively recently on improving its quality. If the site looks like it was designed 10-15 years ago and hasn’t had a facelift since, you can suspect that it’s lost its currency. Some websites look dated despite their content still being relevant, however, that content doesn’t change drastically over time. Like Strunk and White’s Elements of Style mentioned above, sites such as The Mayfield Handbook of Technical & Scientific Writing can still prove useful as free writing guides despite looking like they were designed when most of their current student users were in diapers.