Assessing Your Sources
Searching Library databases provides you with a much higher level of research than your typical Google | Edge search of the world wide web. And while you will still assess and evaluate Library sourced information, you have learned how to do some of this automatically e.g., limit by published date. But there will be times, in your program and as a professional, where you will either choose to search the web or it be your only option. Assessing and evaluating becomes more critical when you are not dealing with curated resources i.e., world wide web. The diversity of information available through your screen is astounding!
Remember:
Information is a commodity available in many flavours
Think about the magazine section in your local grocery store. If you reach out with your eyes closed and grab the first magazine you touch, you are about as likely to get a supermarket tabloid as you are a respected journal (actually more likely, since many respected journals don’t fare well in grocery stores). Now imagine that your grocer is so accommodating that he lets anyone in town print up a magazine and put it in the magazine section. Now if you reach out blindly, you might get the Elvis Lives with Aliens Gazette just as easily as Atlantic Monthly or Time.
Welcome to the internet. As the analogy makes clear, there is an extremely wide variety of material on the internet, ranging in its accuracy, reliability, and value. Unlike most traditional information media (books, magazines, organizational documents), no one has to approve the content before it is made public. It’s your job as a searcher, then, to evaluate what you locate, in order to determine whether it suits your needs.
Information exists on a continuum of reliability and quality
Information is everywhere on the internet, existing in large quantities and continuously being created and revised. This information exists in a large variety of kinds (facts, opinions, stories, interpretations, statistics) and is created for many purposes (to inform, to persuade, to sell, to present a viewpoint, and to create or change an attitude or belief). For each of these various kinds and purposes, information exists on many levels of quality and reliability. It ranges from very good to very bad and includes every shade in between.
As you sift through information, it is not always a stark “yes” or “no” in terms of should you use it. Its worth depends on your information need i.e., what you are trying to prove | disprove; availability of supporting resources; type of creation you are producing; audience you are trying to persuade, etc.
Acronym to Assist: CRAAP
As you think critically about which resources to included in your research and academic work, assessing and evaluating 5 aspects can greatly assist. A tried and true method for evaluating sources is the CRAAP Test.
Take a stab at matching the concepts of CRAAP to their main attributes.
Keeping these 5 considerations at the forefront as you sift through your (re)search results helps you find the quality of sources your instructors expect in academic work and meet the expectations of working in the field.
