• determine the purpose, documentation, and timeliness of a source,
• evaluate the credentials of an author,
• determine the suitability of a source,

Critical thinking and evaluation are important because they focus on public evidence and challenge blind authority and individual bias.

• Evaluate the purpose of the source, whether it is intended to provide public forms of evidence for research claims, sell a product, or promote an ideological, political, or religious orientation. The first purpose, providing evidence to be checked by others, is more desirable than those that follow.

Documentation

• Check to see if the author supports knowledge claims with the proper forms of public evidence, both empirical and logical, and if the author cites other research that is relevant to his or her claims. These are perhaps the most important characteristics in determining the reliability of a source.

Timeliness

• Check the date of publication, since the timeliness of research is crucial to certain fields, especially medicine and the natural sciences. Timeliness is less important to fields such as literature and philosophy.

Authority

• Check the author's credentials. The author should have the appropriate education or training in the subject area being discussed.
• If the author has written a book, check to see if it is published by an academic press.
• If the author has written an article, check to see of it appears in an academic or peer review journal.
• If the author has produced a Website, check to see if it sponsored by the government or a university.
• Books published by an academic press, articles appearing in peer review journals, and Websites sponsored by the government or a university are generally regarded as being more reliable and as possessing greater authority.

Suitability

• Scope - Is the source a general overview of an entire topic or field? Or is it highly specific? Or is it something in between? The purpose of your writing assignment will help you decide the appropriate scope of the sources that you use.
• Audience - Who is the intended audience of the piece? What is the educational level or political, or religious, or ideological orientation of the intended audience? Sources that aim at an unbiased audience are best, for they aim to provide evidence that all will accept and not just opinions that favor a specific orientation. And again, the purpose of your classroom assignment should help you determine the academic level of the materials that you should be reading, either introductory, intermediate, or advanced.
• Scholarly - Scholarly journals are generally peer reviewed, that is, their articles are read and evaluated by experts in the field under consideration. They generally include signed articles, a statement of the author’s credentials or academic affiliation, and a bibliography. All of these attributes help make the source more reliable.
• Popular - Popular magazines, such as Newsweek, are generally intended to reach a wide audience. The articles that appear in them are generally not peer reviewed and usually do not contain a bibliography. The reliability of popular sources is thus generally regarded to be below the level of scholarly sources.
• Research
  • Primary - These books or articles provide original research or reports.
  • Secondary - These books or articles summarize, evaluate and report on primary research.
  • Both can be highly reliable or unreliable, depending upon the criteria discussed above.

Here are some related resources that you can use if you'd like to learn more about this particular topic.

• A Critical Thinking Student Guide http://www.uwf.edu/dlow/critical_thinking.htm
• Critically Analyzing Information Sources http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill26.htm
• Evaluating Sources of Information (OWL) http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_evalsource.html
• Evaluation of Information Sources http://www.vuw.ac.nz/staff/alastair_smith/evaln/evaln.htm
• Evidence - The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing http://www.nutsandboltsguide.com/evidence.html
• Tutorial on How to Evaluate Web Sources http://library.uwf.edu/Tutorials/module_whatistheinternet/default.htm

Now it’s time to test what you’ve learned. Click here to test your knowledge. Be sure to print out your score or e-mail it to yourself or your instructor as proof that you have completed this tutorial.

Douglas Low

dlow@uwf.edu

December 10, 2004