2.4 Thinking Critically About Sources

^[1]This section teaches you how to identify relevant and credible sources that you have most likely turned up on the Web and on your results pages of the library catalog, Google Scholar, and specialized databases. Relevant, credible sources will meet the information needs of your research project.

In order to evaluate a source, you have to answer two questions about it:

1. Is this source relevant to my research question?
2. Is this a credible source– a source my audience^[2] and I should be able to believe?

You might already be worrying about how long evaluating sources is going to take. When you begin your preliminary research, you won’t have to read all of a source to decide whether it is relevant and credible^[3]. However, before you use the source as evidence (direct quotes, paraphrases, and summaries), you will have to read the entire source in order to be able to ethically use the information.

Nonetheless, our advice is to not begrudge the time you spend evaluating sources. It’s one of the most important things to learn at college—the opportunity to evaluate sources is one of the key reasons your professors assign research projects. For the rest of your professional and personal life, you will be using the critical thinking skills that make choosing the right sources possible, so learning those skills is a good investment.

Making Inferences: Good Enough for Your Purpose?

Sources should always be evaluated relative to your purpose – why you’re looking for information. But because there often aren’t clear-cut answers when you evaluate sources, most of the time it is inferences – educated guesses from available clues – that you have to make about whether to use information from particular sources.

Your information needs will dictate:

Thus, your standards for relevance and credibility may vary, depending on whether you need, say

For your research assignments or a health problem, the consequences may be great if you use information that is not relevant or not credible.

Evaluating for Relevancy

Relevant sources are those that pertain to your research question. You’ll be able to figure that out fairly quickly by reading or skimming particular parts of sources. We’ll show you how below, including where to look in specific kinds of sources and what questions to ask yourself as you do.

One thing to consider early on as you make inferences about relevancy is the effect that timeliness, or a source’s currency, should have on deciding whether a source is relevant.

These example research questions also give you two more clues about how to treat the timeliness or currency of sources as you consider relevance:

• Because of how long ago they lived or occurred, it would be unusual for many sources on Robert Scott or the Edo Period to have been published very recently. So, unlike sources for the life sciences, whether a source is very recent should probably not determine its relevancy to those research questions.
• Primary sources might be considered especially relevant to all three research questions. Life science journal articles that provide research findings for the first time count as primary sources. And primary sources (such as Scott’s diaries and expedition photographs, as well as paintings, literature, clothing, and household items from the Edo Period) go a long way in explaining faraway people and times.

For your sources for which timeliness matters, see the section below titled “Where to Look,” which includes where to look in websites, articles, and books for information about a source’s currency.

Time-Saving Tips

Instead of thinking you have to read all of every source in order to figure out whether it is relevant, read or skim only parts of each source. If you’re looking at the right parts, that should give you enough information to make an educated guess about relevancy.

But what should you be looking for as you do that reading and skimming? One way to figure that out is to first parse your research question so that you can figure out its main concepts. (This is like identifying the main concepts in your research question in order to search precisely.)

So when trying to judge which sources are relevant to these main concepts, you would assess whether each source you’ve found pertains to at least one of these concepts. We recommend you use a table like the one in the example below to keep track of which sources address each main concept.

To be considered relevant to your research question, a source wouldn’t necessarily have to cover all of your main concepts, but finding sources that do is ideal. Don’t forget that each source would have to pass the currency test, too, if currency is important to your research question. So it’s wise to record your decisions about the sources’ currency on your tables, too.

There are certain places to look and questions to ask yourself to assess three kinds of sources’ relevancy to your research question. Whatever you do, don’t stop evaluating a source after looking only at a website’s name or the title of another source.

Save time by looking in particular places in sources for information that will help you figure out whether the source is relevant to your research project.

Evaluating for Credibility

Next, you’ll be evaluating each of the sources that you deemed relevant.

What are the clues for inferring a source’s credibility? Let’s start with evaluating websites since we all do so much of our research online. But we’ll also include where to find clues relevant to sources in other formats when they differ from what’s good to use with websites. Looking at specific places in the sources will mean you don’t have to read all of every resource to determine its worth to you.

And remember, the more you take these steps, the faster it goes because always examining your sources becomes second nature.

What Used to Help

It used to be easier to draw conclusions about a source’s credibility, depending on whether it was a print source or a web source. We knew we had to be more careful about information on the web simply because all the filters that promoted accuracy involved in the print publishing process were absent from most web publishing. After all, it takes very little money, skill, and responsible intent to put content on the web, compared with what has to be done to convince print publishers that your content is accurate and that they will make money by printing it.

However, many publishers who once provided only print materials have now turned to the web and have brought along their rigorous standards for accuracy. Among them are the publishers of government, university, and scholarly (peer-reviewed) journal websites. Sites for U.S. mainline news organizations also strive for accuracy rather than persuasion because they know their readers have traditionally expected it. All in all, more websites now take appropriate care for accuracy than what used to be true on the web.

Nonetheless, it still remains very easy and inexpensive to publish on the web without any of the filters associated with print. So, we all still need the critical thinking skills you’ll learn here to determine whether websites’ information is credible enough to suit your purpose.

5 Factors to Consider

Evaluating a website for credibility means considering the five factors below in relation to your purpose for the information. These factors are what you should gather clues about and use to decide whether a site is right for your purpose.

• The source’s neighborhood on the web
• Author and/or publisher’s background
• The degree of bias
• Recognition from others
• The thoroughness of the content

How many factors you consider at any one time depends on your purpose when seeking information. In other words, you’ll consider all five factors when you’re looking for information for a research project or other high-stakes situation where making mistakes have serious consequences. But you might consider only the first three factors at other times.

A Source’s Neighborhood

To understand this concept and begin to use it, imagine that all the sites on the web constitute a community. Just like in a geographical community, there are neighborhoods in which individual sites hang out.

Thinking about what neighborhood a source is in on the web can help you decide whether the site is credible and suits your purpose.

On a website, check pages labeled About Us, About This Site, Mission, Site Index, and Site Map, if available. (If such pages or similarly labeled ones don’t exist, it may be a sign that the site may be less trustworthy.)

Ask yourself these questions to gather clues that will help you decide what neighborhood you’re in:

• Is the site selling products and/or services (even if there are articles and other useful information, too)? Perhaps it’s a retail, service center, or corporate site.
• Are there membership applications and requests for contributions of money or time anywhere on the site? They’re usually a sign that you’re on a site that promotes particular ideas or behavior – in other words, they’re in the advocacy neighborhood.
• Do postings, articles, reports, and/or policy papers give a one-sided view or multiple views on issues, people, and events? If they’re one-sided, the site is probably a commercial site or in the advocacy group neighborhood. If the information is even-handed and includes different sides of an issue, the site is more likely to be on the library/museum, school, or mainline U.S. news side of town. Sites there usually provide information designed to educate rather than persuade. Newspapers, online or in print, usually do have editorial pages, however. But labeling opinions as such helps keep mainline U.S. news sources in the newsstand neighborhood and out of the advocacy neighborhood.

Consider the clues. Then decide the extent that the site’s neighborhood is acceptable for your purpose. It might help to grade the extent that this factor contributes to the site being suitable on a scale like this one:

• A – Very Acceptable
• B – Good, but could be better
• C – OK in a pinch
• D – Marginal
• F – Unacceptable

You’ll want to make a note of the resource’s grade for the neighborhood so you can combine it later with the grades you give the other factors.

Author and Publisher

You’ll always want to know who’s providing the information for a website or other source. Do they have the education, training, or other experience that makes you think they are authorities on the subject covered? Or do they just have opinions?

The more you know about the author and/or publisher, the more confidence you can have in your decision for or against using content from that source.

Authors and publishers can be individuals or organizations, including companies. (Webmasters put things on the site but do not usually decide on everything, content-wise, except for the smallest websites. They often just carry out others’ decisions.)

Sites that do not identify an author or publisher are generally considered less credible for many purposes, including for term papers and other high-stakes projects. The same is true for sources in other formats.

Clues About an Author and/or Publisher’s Background

If they’re available, first take a look at pages called things such as About This Site, About Us, or Our Team first.

• But you may need to browse around a site further to determine its author. Look for a link labeled with anything that seems like it would lead you to the author. Other sources, like books, usually have a few sentences about the author on the back cover or on the flap inside the back cover.
• 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 identity of the publisher is traditionally on the back of the title page.

Sometimes it helps to look for whether a site belongs to a single person or to 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. Personal blogs may not reflect the official views of an organization or meet the standards of formal publication.
• In a similar manner, a tilde symbol (~) preceding a directory name in the site address indicates that the page is in a “personal” directory on the server and is not an official publication of that organization.
  For example, you could tell that Jones’ web page was not an official publication of XYZ University if his site’s address was: http://www.XYZuniversity.edu/~jones/page.html. The tilde indicates it’s just a personal web page—in the Residences, not Schools, neighborhood of the web.
• Unless you find information about the author to the contrary, such blogs and sites should not automatically be considered to have as much authority as content that is officially part of the university’s site. Or you may find that the author has a good academic reputation and is using their blog or website to share resources he or she authored and even published elsewhere. That would nudge him or her toward the Schools neighborhood.
• Learning what they have published before can also help you decide whether that organization or individual should be considered credible on the topic.

Consider the clues. Then decide the extent that the source’s author and/or publisher is acceptable for your purpose. It might help to grade the extent that this factor contributes to the site being suitable on a scale like this one:

• A – Very Acceptable
• B – Good, but could be better
• C – OK in a pinch
• D – Marginal
• F – Unacceptable

You’ll want to make a note of the source’s grade for the author and/or publisher so you can combine it later with the grades you give the other factors.

Degree of Bias

Probably all sources exhibit some bias, simply because it’s impossible for their authors to avoid letting their life experience and education have an effect on their decisions about what is relevant to put on the site and what to say about it.

But that kind of unavoidable bias is very different from a wholesale effort to shape the message so that the site (or other source) amounts to a persuasive advertisement for something important to the author.

Even if the effort is not as strong as a wholesale effort, authors can find many—sometimes subtle—ways to shape communication until it loses its integrity. Such communication is too persuasive, meaning the author has sacrificed its value as information in order to persuade.

While sifting through all the web messages for the ones that suit your purpose, you’ll have to pay attention to both what’s on the sites and in your own mind.

That’s because one of the things that gets in the way of identifying evidence of bias on websites is our own biases. Sometimes the things that look most correct to us are the ones that play to our own biases.

Clues About Bias

Review the website or other source and look for evidence that the site exhibits more or less bias. The factors below provide some clues.

Consider the clues. Then decide the extent that the bias you detected in the source is acceptable for your purpose. It might help to grade the extent that this factor contributes to the site being suitable on a scale like this one:

• A – Very Acceptable
• B – Good, but could be better
• C – OK in a pinch
• D – Marginal
• F – Unacceptable

You’ll want to make a note of the source’s grade for bias so you can combine it later with the grades you give the other factors.

Recognition from Others

Checking to see whether others have linked to a website, tagged, or cited it lets you know who else on the web recognizes the value of the site’s content. Reader comments and ratings can also be informative about some sites you may be evaluating, such as blogs.

If your source is a print book, the blurbs on the front or back cover give you information from authors, experts, or other well-known people who were willing to praise the book and/or author. The same kind of “mini-reviews” may be available on the publisher’s website. You can also look for reviews of the book or other sources by using Google and Google Scholar.

Those links, tags, bookmarks, citations, and positive reader comments and ratings are evidence that other authors consider the site exemplary. Book reviews, of course, may be either positive or negative.

Exactly which individuals and organizations are doing the linking, tagging, citing, rating, and commenting may also be important to you. There may be some company you’d rather your site not keep! Or, maybe the sites that link to the one you’re evaluating may help solidify your positive feelings about the site.

Don’t let an absence of links, tags, citations, ratings, and comments damn the site in your evaluation. Perhaps it’s just not well-known to other authors. The lack of them should just mean this factor can’t add any positive or negative weight to your eventual decision to use the site—it’s neutral.

Activity: Influence You?

Would the blurb on the front cover of Redirect by psychologist Timothy Wilson influence you positively or negatively in your evaluation of the book?

 

Clues about Recognition

Use Bing to find sites that link to a particular URL.

Google does not adequately support this.

Enter inbody:[URL of known site] in the Bing search box.

• For example: inbody:www.deathpenaltyinfo.org

As you look over the results page, always pay attention to more than the number of sites linking to the site about which you’re seeking information. Also, consider the kind of sites that do that linking. Are they the kind of sites you are pleased to see associated with the site you’re interested in? If you are doing academic writing, you should want them to be professional, scholarly, and/or mainline news sources—not, for instance, something from the entertainment neighborhood.

If you prefer recognition from a particular neighborhood, you can ask Bing to look specifically for links from that neighborhood.

Suppose, for instance, you wonder whether scholarly sources link to the site above but don’t want to look for them among all that you turned up before. You should type in the Bing search box inbody:www.deathpenaltyinfo.org site:edu in order to see whether any scholarly sources link to that site.

Find citations of an article. Although there is no simple way to find every source that cites an article in a popular magazine, a blog, or a scholarly journal, there are some ways to look for these connections.

• For articles published in popular magazines or blogs, enter the title of the article in quotes in the search box of a search engine like Google. The resulting list should show you the original article you’re evaluating, plus other sites that have mentioned it in some way. Click on those that you want to know more about.

Activity: Inferences

Use Bing to determine how many scholarly sites have made links to these sites. Copy each search statement below and put it in the Bing search box to make your searches.

• inbody:www.DOAJ.org site:edu
• inbody:www.nvic.org site:edu

Sometimes you’ll even have to take a look at the linking organization’s document in order to figure out why it’s linking. For instance, is it linking to a bad example that it wants to show? As with all source evaluations,  you’ll have to make inferences.

• For articles published in scholarly journals, use Google Scholar to enter the title of the article in quotes. In the results list, find the article you’re evaluating. (Many articles have similar titles.) Look for the number of citations in the lower left of the listing for your article. If you want more information on the authors who have done the citing, click on the citation number for a clickable list of articles or papers and get the names of authors to look up at the end of the articles or with a search engine. (This is a good way to discover more articles about your topic, too.)

Making the Inference

Consider the clues. Then decide the extent that the source’s recognition from others is acceptable for your purpose. It might help to grade the extent that this factor contributes to the site being suitable on a scale like this one:

• A – Very Acceptable
• B – Good, but could be better
• C – OK in a pinch
• D – Marginal
• F – Unacceptable

You’ll want to make a note of the source’s grade for recognition so you can combine it later with the grades you give the other factors.

Thoroughness

Figuring out whether a website or other source is suitable for your purpose also means looking at how thoroughly it covers your topic

You can evaluate thoroughness in relation to other sources on the same topic. Compare your source to how other sources cover the material, checking for missing topics or perspectives.

Clues About Thoroughness

Click around a site to get some idea of how thoroughly it covers the topic. If the source you are evaluating is a print resource, read the introduction and conclusion and also the table of contents to get a glimpse of what it covers. Look at the index to see what subject is covered with the most pages. Is it thorough enough to meet your information need?

Tip: Related Sites

Use Google to find other sites on the same topic by entering related:[the URL of the site you know] in the search box.

For example: related:guides.osu.edu

Use this technique to browse other sites Google turns up. Do other sites cover aspects of the topic that are missing from the site you are evaluating? Or does your site stack up pretty well against the competition?

Making the Inference

Consider the clues. Then decide the extent that the source’s thoroughness is acceptable for your purpose. It might help to grade the extent that this factor contributes to the source being suitable on a scale like this one:

• A – Very Acceptable
• B – Good, but could be better
• C – OK in a pinch
• D – Marginal
• F – Unacceptable

You’ll want to make a note of the source’s grade for thoroughness so you can combine it later with the grades you give the other factors.

Combining the Factors

Once you’ve considered each factor used in evaluating a source, it’s important to take a look at the inferences you made about them. Now is the time to look at those grades all together—to average them if you’ve been assigning grades—and to make one more inference.

Taking the grade on each factor into account, can you infer that the source is credible enough for your purpose? If it isn’t, this is one source that can’t be helpful in your project. If it is relevant and credible enough, you can use information from that resource with confidence.

Making the Final Inference

Assume you’re writing a term paper and are considering using information from Site XYZ. You ran through the evaluation process as you looked over the site, and you made notes about the grades you assigned.

The grades you gave individual factors are:

• Neighborhood: A
• Author/publisher’s background: B
• Degree of bias: A
• Recognition from others: No Evidence
• Thoroughness: C
• Currency of the content: A

You average the grades (A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, F=0), remembering not to include the factor on which you gave no grade. The score was 3.4, about a B, which is a “Good, but could be better” score on the scale we used in this tutorial.

Would you use this source in your paper? This answer may vary depending on what your other sources look like. Is this your highest grade of source? Will this be a heavily used source in your paper as you work to prove your point? The answers to questions like these may push you to keep looking or include this source in your final paper.

When Should You Stop?

Research shows that students often don’t know when they should stop trying to find and evaluate sources for a particular project.^[8] How many sources are enough? It’s hard to say, exactly. But you’ll need enough to meet the information needs of your project and to meet the requirements your professor told you about.

Furthermore, you may change your mind as you continue working on your project. There is probably not a researcher alive who hasn’t thought he or she had enough relevant sources, only to change their mind later when they were actually writing the final product.

The process of finding, reading, and evaluating sources can very rewarding; however, as with most things in life, it can also be extremely frustrating and at times you may feel defeated. Learning how to find, read, and evaluate sources is a skill that academics (even your professor) are continually learning more about and developing their skills in. So, before you reach the point where you fear your hair may be close to falling out completely, reach out to your professor. They have not only been trained in these same skills and environment, but because they will serve as a new set of eyes on the topic, they can oftentimes point you in a direction you haven’t thought of.^[9]