Objective
In this lesson, you will learn to evaluate sources effectively so that you can
choose the most relevant and authoritative sources for academic papers and writing
projects.
Thinking about Evaluating Sources
Choosing the most useful and effective sources for an academic paper is at best
a challenging task. However, there are common sense steps to take when attempting
to choose sources. First, you must know what types of research can lead to a
source and what types of sources there are.
Conducting Research
You can conduct research in a variety of ways:
- Using the Library (either at the library itself or online);
- Using Field Research, which is when you gather the data through observations,
questionnaires or surveys, and interviews; and
- Using the Internet.
You can find more information about each of these research methods in Chapter
3, Process, Lessons 12 - 14 of this Handbook. See Lesson 11: Using
the Library Wisely, Lesson 12: Conducting Field Research,
and Lesson 13: Using the Internet Wisely.
Types of Sources for Research
There are two basic types of research sources: primary and secondary.
Primary sources: A primary source can be comprised of various types
of data. One type of primary source is the data that you collect if you conduct
field research. Any results of an observation, survey, or interview are primary
data. If you conduct an experiment in biology or psychology class, the resulting
data are primary. If you are conducting a literary study, then the primary
source is the piece of literature that you need to research. For example,
if your teacher assigns a literary analysis paper of Jane Austin's novel,
Pride and Prejudice, then Pride and Prejudice is your primary source. If you
are studying an historical event, like commanding generals in the Gulf War
of 1991, then an autobiography by former General Schwartzkopf is a primary
source. If you are studying the occurrences of mass murders at American schools,
then an interview with an accused shooter, published by a credible magazine,
is a primary source.
Most good research projects begin with some primary sources. Furthermore,
many teachers prefer that your research include at least one primary source
if possible. Often, field research is one way to accomplish that goal. Primary
sources may be the subject of your study or simply what makes the topic more
interesting. In either case, your writing should use the primary resource
well. For more help with this task, see Chapter 3, Lesson 9, Evaluating Sources in this handbook.
Secondary Sources: Your teacher probably will want you to use more
than one or two primary resources to support your ideas and writing strongly.
If your teacher does require other sources other than primary ones, they are
called secondary sources or outside sources. Secondary sources can be books
about your subject (e.g., about the Gulf War), journal articles (e.g., about
why there are so many high school shootings in the past ten years), scholarly
journals or websites (e.g., about the meaning of various symbols and characters
in Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice), newspaper articles (e.g., about how
other scientists are handling the same research questions that you have in
your biology or psychology class), and many other types of publications or
discussions of an issue.
Check with your instructor for how many primary and secondary sources s/he
thinks is necessary. One way to get this kind of help is to write a brief,
one-page proposal that outlines your research question, possible thesis, and
the sources you've selected. Your teacher may be willing to go over this proposal
with you and give you hints on the quality and quantity of your research sources.
You also can send a proposal to SMARTHINKING's Essay Center
or work with a live tutor at the Live Writing Center.
Guidelines for Evaluating Sources
In order to write a strong essay or argument, you must choose the best sources
to use in the paper. It may seem easy to evaluate primary sources because those
usually are what you are addressing in the research question itself. But, as
Chapter 3, Process, Lessons 12 - 14 of this Handbook, (Using the
Library Wisely, Conducting Field Research, and Using
the Internet Wisely) each assert, there is a difference between strong and
weak sources. Secondary sources, even more than primary ones, often are tricky
to evaluate.
The following list provides criteria, or guidelines, to help you evaluate sources:
Relevance: Does the source provide information that you need? The
source should not just be another book to put on your list. The sources you
choose should be important to the paper you are writing.
- If, for example, you are writing about the Gulf War and you use General
Schwartzkopf's autobiography, will that text tell you enough about the war
overall, or will it be too specific to Schwartzkopf's experiences? It might
be.
- However, if you are studying General Schwartzkopf as your primary subject,
then his autobiography will be very useful. In addition, other biographies
or accounts of the Gulf War also may be relevant if they reveal more information
about Schwartzkopf or explain circumstances that guided his actions.
- Would a source that speaks primarily about the American uses of oil be
just as relevant? Again, it might be if you are trying to explain some of
the origins of the war; however, such a source could lead you down a very
broad path that takes you away from your primary subject.
You will have to read and consider the source to see whether it actually
adds to your researched writing. (HINT: To do a brief review of a source,
skim the title, publication date, table of contents, introduction, and index.)
Author: Is the author of the source identified? Does s/he have credentials
in the field about which s/he is writing? Do other authors cite this person
in their own writing? One way to answer these questions is to learn more about
the author.
- If you're reading a book, then usually the author's credentials are given
in the preface or on the back cover. If you're reading a journal article,
then the credentials are offered somewhere before, within, or after the
article. To learn whether other authors cite this person, see your Reference
Librarian for various bibliographies that might list this author. Ask your
teacher if s/he has heard of this individual.
- Some cases are fairly easy. For example, if you have to choose between
a website for fans of the movie Pride and Prejudice and a well-known literary
scholar's journal article about the novel, you would choose the source written
by the person with the best credentials--the literary scholar.
- Other cases are not so simple. If you are writing about high school shootings
and you have the choice between a Newsweek article about one of the shooting
episodes and an interview with the National Rifle Association (NRA) president,
Charlton Heston, you'd have to consider the potential bias and agenda of
the source. While Heston might have studied the shooting incident, he has
a clear agenda to support the NRA. What agenda or bias can you find in the
Newsweek article? (HINT: There certainly is an agenda or bias there because
every writer has an agenda and bias, even if s/he doesn't realize it consciously).
Credibility: Credibility deals with whether the source is believable
or trustworthy.
- In some ways, credibility is an extension of the reality that everyone
has an agenda and bias. In other ways, it is an extension of whether the
author has good credentials and background knowledge in the area that you're
studying. Credibility also has to do with who has conducted the research
(if secondary) and who has published the data.
- Most academic writers believe that if a book or journal is "juried'
or reviewed by knowledgeable peers, then the source is worth trusting-not
as "truth" but as worthy of thought. Some people point out that
credibility is especially hard to establish on Internet sites, where there
usually is no one to review the information in a particular website.
- Ask your teacher for guidelines about Internet site use for your research.
Also, see Chapter 3, Process, Lesson 13: Using the Internet
Wisely.
Publication date: Books, journal articles, magazine essays, field
research, and websites all should list their dates of data gathering and their
publication dates.
- For books and journal articles, you'll want to look for publication dates
as recent as the past five years. But that is only a general piece of advice.
Most often, a very recent publication date suggests that the source has
been researched and written with the most up-to-date information possible.
For some disciplines, like biology or psychology, for example, the publication
date is extremely important since new research is published frequently in
the sciences.
- However, some older sources can be useful as well. For example, scholars
have been studying Austin's Pride and Prejudice, written in 1813, for well
over a century. Thus, some older explications of the text may give insight
to the era in which it was written.
- In another example, if you're studying Jack the Ripper, a Victorian English
murderer, then older, authoritative texts will have value as well as newer
texts that have incorporated the older source. Again, there is no easy answer,
but the date of the publication can offer you guidance for whether the source
is one that you should use.
Audience: Evaluating the audience is a matter of considering for whom
the resource information was written.
- If the source was written for specialists and it has a lot of technical
language and some "jargon," you'll need to decide how much of
the text is helpful for your writing. In this case, you need to understand
the information in the text well enough to incorporate it though summary,
paraphrasing, and quotations to support your own essay or argument.
- If the source was written for non-professionals or specialists, then you'll
need to decide whether it delves deeply enough into the subject or whether
it simply explains the issue in clearer language than the source written
by a specialist.
- Along with these considerations, you have to evaluate your own audience
so that the depth and breadth of the material is suited to the knowledge
and interest levels of the people for whom you are writing. For more help
with audience considerations, see Chapter 2, Audience, Lessons 1-6 in this
handbook.
Length: Students often are worried about how long their own writing
is supposed to be. Most teachers realize that students need to learn to write
"as much as needs to be written to say what you need to say." Length,
therefore, is a very relative measurement of the value of your own writing
and of your sources. However, length does give you a clue about the depth
of information that your source can offer you. A one-page discussion in Time
Magazine about General Schwartzkopf's role in winning the Gulf War probably
isn't as helpful as a twenty-page article in a journal that chronicles modern
warfare. Nor is it as valuable as a 200-page book about the Gulf War where
Schwartzkopf is discussed in forty-three pages. Thus, look to length to give
you clues on depth of detail and information.
_______________________________________________________
Exercise: Identify the most reliable source of the two sources given.
(Our responses are listed below.)
1. For an essay about missing children who may have been kidnapped, would you
select choice A or B?
A.) Website: www.missingkids.com/html/amberplan.html The site was created
by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. This particular
page does not reveal a date of publication, but it does include an "800"
telephone number and numerous official links to learn more about both exploited
children and the "Amber Plan." This is a .com or commercial website,
although there are no commercial advertisements on the site.
B.) Website: http://www.taxes.about.com/library/weekly/aa021601a.htm This
site is about how to claim tax exemptions for a kidnapped or missing child.
It is a commercial site, signified by the .com and by the numerous commercial
advertising pop-up boxes on the site. It does have a copyright date of 2002.
2. For an essay about ancient Greece and its influences on American Society,
would you select source A or B?
A.) Book: Living with the Ancients by Thomas Dow; published by Oxford University
Press, 2001
B.) Book: Fun Facts about the Ancients by Alison Green; published by Harper
& Row, 1965
3. For an essay about Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet," the Shakespeare
play, would you select source A or B?
A.) Journal Article: "Reading Shakespeare's Plays" by Angela Cole;
in Renaissance Quarterly, 1905.
B.) Journal Article: "Romeo and Juliet: More Than Star Crossed Lovers"
by John Wright; in Shakespeare Quarterly, 2001.
Our Responses:
Question 1: A. Choice B has several problems. It has a clear agenda, which
is to help parents of missing children file for tax money, but there is an
implication that parents will be paying for this assistance. It really doesn't
deal with missing children except for how parents can still claim the children
on their tax forms. Furthermore, the pop-up advertisements give this site
less credibility. Choice A also has an agenda, but it is to inform about missing
children and, possibly, to solicit donations to a nationally recognized goal
of finding missing children.
Question 2: A. Choice B. has one major warning flag: it was published in
1965, over thirty-five years ago. Although this older source would be acceptable
for some essays where an older view of the issue is helpful, choice A is the
better choice in this case. It is likely that more information has come to
light about the ancient world in the past thirty-five years, which would make
the content of choice B less relevant or true. Choice A was published in 2001,
so it is very recent. In addition, it was published by a prestigious publisher,
Oxford University Press, as opposed to a commercial publisher who may have
been appealing to a different audience than an academic one.
Question 3: B is the best choice because choice A is nearly a century older
and it won't contain any of the newest thinking about Shakespeare. In fact,
it may not contain much about "Romeo and Juliet" and since that
play and the character of Juliet is your particular topic, it is best to start
with an article that deals in particular with that play. However, if your
paper was about early twentieth century criticism about Shakespeare, then
choice A might have had more value to you.
_____________________________________________________
Summary
In conclusion, when you are writing a paper that includes sources, remember
to consider where you conduct your research (library, field research, Internet),
what kind of research the source represents (primary or secondary), and criteria
for evaluating these sources (the source's relevance to the topic, the source's
author, the author's credibility, the source's publication date, the audience
for whom the source was written, and the source's length).
For more information about researching a topic, also read Chapter 3, Process,
Lesson 11 - 14 in this handbook.
For information on how to use these sources well, read Chapter 3, Process,
Lesson 9 in this handbook ("Evaluating Sources").
For information on how to document these sources, read Chapter 3, Process,
Lesson 14 in this handbook ("MLA and APA Documentation").
  
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