Online sources pose special challenges to students and professionals conducting research, since most will expediently conduct research entirely online where some of the above indicators of credibility must be rethought a little. Sometimes the author isn’t revealed on a webpage, perhaps because it’s a company or organization’s website, in which case your scrutiny shifts to the organization, its potential biases, and its agenda. A research project on electronic surveillance, for instance, might turn up the websites of companies selling monitoring systems, in which case you must be wary of any facts or statistics (especially un-cited ones, but even cited sources) they use because they will likely have only been selected to help sell products and services.

Domain Name

Instead of checking the publisher as you would for a print source, you could consider the domain name; websites with .edu or .gov URL endings usually have higher standards of credibility for the information they publish rather than sites ending with .com or .org, which are typically commercial enterprises (as in the monitoring systems example above) and special interest groups with unique agendas.

Wikipedia

Although successful in being a comprehensive repository of knowledge, Wikipedia.org, for instance, is not generally considered credible and should therefore not appear as a source in a research document unless it’s for a topic so new or niche that no other credible sources for it exist. By the organization’s own admission, “Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found [on their site].” The Web 2.0, user-generated nature of Wikipedia means that its articles are susceptible to vandalism or content changes inconsistent with expert opinion, and they aren’t improved by any formal peer-review process (Wikipedia, 2015). Wikipedia sacrifices credibility for comprehensiveness. For these reasons, a Wikipedia article in a research report is a little laughable; few will take you seriously if they see it there because you will look lazy for stopping at the first available source and picking the lowest-hanging fruit.

A Good Place To Start

A Wikipedia article can be a good place to start in a research task, however. If you’re approaching a topic for the first time, use Wikipedia for a general introduction and a sense of the topic’s scope and key subtopics. (Wikimedia Commons is also a reliable source of images provided you credit them properly.) But if you’re going to cite any sources, don’t stop there; use the credible ones that the Wikipedia article cites by scrolling down to the References section, checking them out, and assessing them for their credibility.

Important Note

Wikipedia publishes its information under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0. This makes it a great resource when looking for pictures to use in presentations and assignments. Just remember to cite your sources accordingly.

Website Design

A final indicator of credibility for online sources, similar to the writing-quality check discussed above, is the overall design quality of the website. The attractiveness of a site may be subjective, but a user-friendly and modern design suggests that money was spent relatively recently on improving its quality. If the site looks like it was designed 10-15 years ago and hasn’t had a facelift since, you can suspect that it’s lost its currency. Some websites look dated despite their content still being relevant, however, because that content doesn’t change drastically over time. Like Strunk and White’s Elements of Style mentioned above, sites such as The Mayfield Handbook of Technical & Scientific Writing can still prove useful as free writing guides despite looking outdated.

Attribution

This chapter is an adaptation of 3.2: Locating Credible Sources  by John Corr; Grant Coleman; Betti Sheldrick; and Scott Bunyan and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. You can download this book for free at Essential Communication Skills: Mohawk College Copyright © 2022.