Overall Ways to Evaluate Resources:
- Authorship – Authorship allows the reader to know the credentials and expertise in the field that they are writing about. This includes looking for degrees, where the author acquired them, and what their educational background specifies in.
- Relevance – Relevance gives the reader an idea of if the resource is useful or not. They should look for the overall meaning of the writing and try to grasp if it goes well with the other resources it is paired with. Look for connections between the resources.
- Documentation – So why are citations important, you might wonder? References prove the validity that a resource is scholarly or beneficial they truly are. The resources in the lists can be used to find other resources to support the research.
- Currency – Currency, or time of publication, is relevant because of the type of publication. If the piece is historical, the older resource is then valuable despite its publication age. Research that is scientific is usually more credible if it is published more recently. However, there are different reasons based on the type of resource. Looking at a resource critically based on the fact that not every discipline looks at publication date is important.
- Audience - Who the audience is can determine a lot about why the resource is written. A scholarly journal would lend itself to an academic or researcher. A trade publication lends itself to a professional who is in a field that looks at their career. Looking to determine the audience can be by looking at the resource type, the publisher, or the author's point of view. When looking at the audience this means that as a reader, one might need to look at the resource as a whole.
- Overall comments for each source: These are important due to the fact you have evaluated a resource and now have time to think about your evaluation as a whole. Each portion of the evaluation is important, therefore, when one evaluates the resource, then they need to consider:
- Why are each of these evaluative pieces important?
- If a resource is credible, can it be without one of these pieces? Why or why not?
- Did evaluating these resources change the way you felt about them?
GoogleScholar and the Thomas G. Carpenter Library
