Consider the features below after you have read your potential source and feel you have a good understanding of it. Does it fit well? Does it provide the evidence that you want?
From Northern Arizona State University Library.
All media sources are biased to some extent. This chart shows some popular media outlets and places them on this two-dimensional grid to represent their trustworthiness (top of the chart means high accuracy) and political bias (the further left the more liberal, the further right the more conservative viewpoints.) This chart is updated every January and August.
This video is part of a series of videos from Mike Caulfield, Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University Vancouver. One of his long-time interests is teaching college undergraduates web literacy skills using the S.I.F.T. method.
In this video, Caulfield goes through steps to verify a questionable claim. He does this by seeing if this claim is repeated by any other websites. This is a good skill to learn to find the highest quality and most authoritative information.
Using the references or bibliography from another author's book or article is a wonderful way to find additional sources for your own research. Some databases even provide links to the references, as noted in the circled links in the picture below.
"Cited References" will list the 91 sources that this team of authors used to write this article. This will lead the researcher to older information that existed before this article was published.
"Times Cited in this Database" will list any articles that use this article as one of it's sources. In this case, one article has been published that uses this article as one of its sources. This will lead the researcher to more current publications.
Faculty have probably been telling you since your first year of college (or maybe before!) not to use Wikipedia as a source in your papers. They are right. It is very difficult to judge the credibility of information from a Wikipedia page. And no college student should rely on a simple encyclopedia entry to support information in a well-written paper. HOWEVER, it can be a useful tool for very current topics. And sometimes the references of a Wikipedia entry will lead a researcher to some wonderful sources.
Entries 1 , 2 , 7 and 12.: Who is Solove and what did he or she write in 2008 that was so important to my topic of privacy? Look Solove up in Wikipedia and find out who he is and the title of the book that is referenced here. This skill helps novice researchers identify the experts.
Entry 3: A (very old!) magazine article. Not many databases go back to the 19th century!
Entry 4, 5, 8, 9 and 11: Journal articles, some that may be available online.
Entry 6, 10 and 13. Books