LESSON 5: EVALUATING
INFORMATION SOURCES
Tutorial:
Evaluating Internet Sites 101
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
To understand why
evaluating information is necessary.
To know how to find
information about an author's background and qualifications.
To know how to find
published reviews of books.
To know how to find information about periodicals.
To know the basic principles
of evaluating web sites.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1. Preface
2. Finding
Information about Authors
3. Evaluating Books
4. Evaluating
Periodical Articles
5. Evaluating
Websites
6. Key Points to
Remember
1. PREFACE
It has been said
that an educated person is someone who can make distinctions, i.e. someone who
can recognize and separate the significant from the irrelevant, the high
quality from the average, the coherent from the distorted. The ability to make
these kinds of distinctions is especially important when doing research because
not everything your research uncovers will be of equal value. Some of the
information you find will be relevant and credible, some will not, and much
will be somewhere in-between.
Research, therefore, is not
merely finding information; it's also about evaluating it for usefulness and
credibility. You must make value judgments about the worth of information
sources because the quality of the information you find is vastly more
important than the quantity. This lesson will teach you specific criteria for
making these evaluations.
2. FINDING INFORMATION ABOUT AUTHORS
The first step in
evaluating any information source (i.e. books, periodical articles, or
websites) is to ask yourself two questions:
Question #1: Who is the author(s)?
There are only 3 possibilities: a person(s), an organization, or not
given. It is the convention in all
academic and formal writing for the author(s) name to be clearly
identified. If no author is given, that
must be kept in mind when evaluating the source as a whole and could reduce its
credibility.
Have you seen this author’s name cited in other sources or bibliographies? Respected authors are often cited by other
scholars. For that reason, take note of
those authors that appear in many sources.
Question #2: Is he/she/they qualified to
be writing on this topic? Is this the author’s area of expertise?
To answer this question you must try to find out something about the author’s
background in terms of education, experience, occupation, position, past
writings, political perspective, professional or academic affiliations, awards,
etc.
Where do you find this background information?
There are several places to look:
* The source itself.
Articles frequently have brief information about the author on the first or
last page.
Books may give information about the author at the beginning or end, or on the
back cover or inside cover. If the book
has an introduction written by someone other than the author, some details
about the author will usually be given.
If your information source is a website, look for links on the homepage such as
these: “About the Author,” “About Us,” or “Who We Are.”
* Websites
To search for web pages that give information about an author, use a Web search
engine (e.g. Google)
and enter the name in quotation marks,
first name first. Keep in mind that authors
who are faculty members at colleges and universities often list their
credentials at their school’s website.
* Books
If the author is an important literary figure or politically or culturally
prominent, entire books may be written about him or her. Books about people can
be found in library catalogs (e.g. the PLS online
catalog) by doing a subject search using the author’s name
as the subject. (Remember to search by the last name first.)
* Periodical articles
Magazines and newspapers frequently write articles profiling authors. Use
periodical databases such as the Gale-InfoTrac PowerSearch databases to find these articles.
Start by searching the author’s name as a subject (last name first) to
see if any entire articles are written about the author. If you don't find any
articles specifically about the author, do a full-text keyword search (author’s
name entered first name first) to find articles in which your author’s name is
mentioned anywhere in the text.
* Online databases
Information about literary authors or especially well-known authors may be
found in either of two subscription databases accessible through Skyline
College Library:
-- Literature
Resource Center includes biographical information on
over 100,000 writers.
-- Biography
Resource Center provides biographical information on
nearly 275,000 people from throughout history, around the world, and across all
disciplines and subject areas.
* Specialized print reference sources
Contemporary
Authors
(REF Z1224.C6). One of the most comprehensive sources of information about
writers of all literary genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, etc.) who
have lived since 1900 and whose work has been published in the U.S. or
translated into English. Covers over 90,000 writers. Contemporary Authors has reached over 100 volumes in print and
Skyline Library owns a portion of the full set.
Who's Who in
American Men and Women of Science (REF Q141.A474). An 8-volume set providing
biographical information about 119,618 scientists and engineers from
Now that you have some information about the author, you now move on to
evaluating the content of the information source itself.
3. EVALUATING BOOKS
One of the best ways to begin evaluating a book is to find book reviews and
learn what other people think about it. Book reviews summarize and critique the
ideas presented in a book, thus giving you a deeper understanding of the work
and helping you decide if it's relevant to your topic.
Book reviews are published in magazines, journals, newspapers, and on the
Internet. Listed below are common ways
to find book review articles:
* General periodical
databases (such as the Gale-InfoTrac PowerSearch databases):
Usually used to find reviews of general interest books. Enter the title of the
book (if it is unique). If not unique, enter
the title and the author. If a title plus author search does not limit your
results enough, type “AND,” then
add the term “review.”
* Subject periodical databases: (such as
ProQuest
Psychology Journals, ProQuest
Biology Journals, and many others)
Used to find reviews of academic and specialized books.
* Newspaper databases (such as InfoTrac
Newspapers):
Used in the same way as general periodical databases.
* Newspaper websites (such as the New York Times Book Review web page):
Websites for major newspapers are often good sources for reviews of recent
books.
* Book Review websites:
There are a number of websites that specifically provide book reviews
written either by professional reviewers or by readers who are interested
enough to write and send in their personal reviews. Yahoo has a directory of many of these book review sites at http://www.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/Literature/Reviews/. The
books reviewed are primarily recent popular works.
* Amazon.com
and other online bookstores:
Online bookstores list
a large number of books of all types, and usually provide descriptions and
reviews. However, it’s very important to check closely the source of
the reviews and descriptions included in online bookstore sites since they
often include favorable descriptions submitted by publishers that appear to be
reviews but are, in effect, advertising copy. Given below is an example
from barnesandnoble.com. Although
this appears to be a review
of Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes: The
History of the CIA, it
is more accurate to view this as an advertisement
for the book since it is written by the book's publisher -- Doubleday.
For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a
formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in
top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not
succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the
words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”
Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim
Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the
record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from
the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans,
including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its
creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on
terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll. Tim Weiner’s past work on
the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely
entertaining” in The New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal called it “truly
extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven
presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand
the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape
than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our
national security.
Reviews written by readers are
also often found at online bookstore sites. For example, amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com groups these
together and calls them “Customer Reviews.” These reviews, however, are
generally not regarded as authoritative as reviews written by established
critics, authors, and scholars.
Although there is much more involved in the overall process of evaluating a
book, finding reviews is a crucial first step.
4. EVALUATING PERIODICAL ARTICLES
Evaluating periodical articles begins by asking yourself: “Who is responsible
for the article?” This is sometimes
referred to as evaluating the authority
of the article and involves looking for information about two things:
* the author(s) of the article, and
* the publication in which the article
was published.
Section 2 of this lesson has already discussed how to find information about an
author. After you have some idea of the
authority of the author, you investigate the publication itself by asking:
“What type of periodical is this?”
TYPES OF
PERIODICALS
You may recall from Lesson 3, section 7, that there are 5 types of
periodicals. Let’s review them briefly:
1) Scholarly and Research Journals --
specialized publications intended for scholars and students of a particular
discipline or subject.
2) Professional Magazines and Journals -- –
publications that report on news and developments in a particular profession,
academic field, trade, or industry.
3) Magazines and Journals of Commentary and Opinion --offer
analysis, commentary, and investigative reporting on social and political
issues. These publications typically
view the world from either a politically liberal, moderate, or conservative
stance.
4) Popular Magazines and News Magazines --
commercial publications intended for the general reader.
5) Newspapers -- daily
publications that provide local, national, and international news, editorials,
entertainment, advertising and other sorts of practical information.
To help you identify the periodical type, and to find out more about the
publication, such as its political perspective and the types of articles it
publishes, a few things can be done:
* Go to the publication's website. From the publication's home page, look for any
description or hints about the publication's perspectives or affiliations. Look
for links such as "About Us,"
or "About this publication,"
or "Publisher's Information."
You can usually find a publication's website by using a
search engine (e.g. Google). Type in the full
title of the periodical (in quotation
marks) and the publication's website should come up near the top of the
result list. In some cases, it may be more difficult to find the website for
certain periodicals. This may be the case if the publication has a common name,
if the publication's website is contained within a broader website--such as
that of a publisher or an affiliated organization -- or for other reasons.
You may sometimes have an easier time finding a
publication's web site by using PubList (publist.com), a web-based directory of over 150,000 domestic and
international print and electronic publications. You can do a title search for
a publication on PubList to get basic
information about a publication, such as how often the periodical is published,
the name and address of the publisher, and the publication's web address. (To
search the PubList directory, the
site may request that you complete some basic registration information. You can
register for free to get your own user name and password or you may use Skyline
Library's registration by entering: Skyline
Library as User name and library
as password.)
You can also find information about many publications
using the website, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that
is created collaboratively by people
throughout the world--anyone with access to the Internet can edit
any information in the encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is an excellent tool for finding quick information on a huge
number of topics, but since anyone can write or edit information in Wikipedia, information
found in this encyclopedia should always be verified by another source to be
sure that it is accurate. Wikipedia
has some information on a large number of publications, but the information is
often brief. To balance accuracy and
objectivity, it can be effective to use information about a publication found
in Wikipedia in combination with information found on the publication’s own
website.
* Search the print source Magazines for Libraries
Publication information from a publisher's website is
not always objective since it is written by its own staff. Therefore, consider consulting Magazines for Libraries, a reference
book which is available at Skyline Library on the “Ready Reference” shelves
behind the reference desk (Z 6941 .M23 2002).
Magazines for Libraries
provides relatively unbiased descriptions of about 6,900 of the most important
magazines in all fields. It is available only in print.
In addition to the descriptive annotations, Magazines
for Libraries also provides publication information about each periodical
that can be useful when evaluating the publication. The information for each
title includes:
-- frequency of publication: abbreviations indicate if
the periodical is published weekly (w), monthly (m),bi-monthly (bi-m),
quarterly (q), etc.
-- publisher: you can check whether the periodical is
published by an academic organization, a commercial company or other group
-- whether or not the journal is "refereed."
If the periodical is refereed, the word "refereed" precedes
"Circ." information
-- a list of periodical databases that index the
publication
To
summarize, you gain a deeper perspective on an article by taking the time to
find some information about the author and the publication in which it appears.
5. EVALUATING WEBSITES
You may recall from Lesson 3 that
roughly 50% of the Web is what’s known as the Visible Web.
The Visible Web contains free websites found by using search engines and the
quality of those websites varies dramatically. There are no restrictions,
guidelines, or review processes for these free websites. Therefore, you
must examine these websites closely, using your critical thinking skills to
judge for yourself the validity and credibility of the information provided.
How do you evaluate a website? A good first step is to notice the domain
name within the URL. As discussed in lesson 4, the domain name is a
key factor when evaluating a site since it indicates where the information
originates. The most common domain names are:
.edu: an educational institution (can be anything from scholarly
research to zany student pages)
.gov: a government body (usually dependable)
.com: a commercial enterprise (may be trying to sell a product)
.net: network (network oriented entities such as Internet Service
Providers)
.org: a non-profit organization (may or may not be biased)
After identifying the domain name, there are six other criteria upon which to
base your evaluation:
- Author
- Audience
- Scholarship
- Bias
- Currency
- Links
To learn about each of these
factors, click on the link given below (a new window will open) and complete
the tutorial “Evaluating
Internet Sites 101.”
(This tutorial is Step 2 of this lesson.)
Evaluating Internet Sites 101
NOTE:
Please do NOT complete the “Course Credit Acknowledgment” page at the end of
the tutorial. Instead, go back to this reading (by closing the tutorial
window) and continue with Section 6: “Key Points to Remember.”
6. KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER
* Research is not merely finding information; it's also about evaluating it
for usefulness and credibility.
* The first step in evaluating any information
source (i.e. books, periodical articles, or websites) is to ask yourself two
questions:
Question #1: Who is the author(s)?
Question #2: Is he/she/they qualified to be writing on this
topic? Is this the author’s
area of expertise?
* There are several ways to learn background
information about an author, including the information source itself, websites,
books, periodical articles, online databases, and specialized print reference
books.
* One of the best ways to begin
evaluating a book is to find book reviews and learn what other people think
about it. Book reviews are published in
magazines, journals, newspapers, and on the Internet.
* Evaluating periodical articles begins
by evaluating the authority of
the article. This involves looking for
information about the author and the publication in which the article appeared.
* Two ways to find out more about a
periodical is to go to the publication’s website and/or search the print source
Magazines for Libraries.
* There are no restrictions, guidelines, or review processes for free websites
found in the Visible Web. Therefore,
you must examine these free websites closely, using your critical thinking
skills to judge for yourself the validity and credibility of the information
provided.
* Websites are evaluated by first identifying the domain type
and then using six criteria to further assess the website: author, audience,
scholarship, bias, currency, and links.
Last revised: 2-26-08 by
These materials may be used for educational
purposes if you inform and credit the author and cite the source as: LSCI
100:Introduction to Information Research. All commercial rights are
reserved. Send comments or suggestions to: