Library DIY

Relevance

Relevance considers the importance of the information for your research needs. A relevant information source answers your research question. To determine relevance, the purpose and bias must be understood. In fact, all aspects of evaluation must be taken into consideration to determine relevance. 

Key questions for evaluating source relevance

1. What is it about? The title will be your first immediate clue. If available, read the abstract (a summary of the article). If there is no abstract, read the article introduction and scan the article headings. Consider how the item relates to your research question and how you might use it.
    
2. What is the subject area focus? Knowing what discipline an article comes from can help you decide if the article is relevant. For example, if you are researching global warming activism for a political science class, an article on global warming from a chemistry journal may not be helpful if it doesn't focus on political issues. Look at the title of the book or article or the journal title to try to determine the subject area. 
    
3. Are you looking for recent information? If so, look carefully at publication dates. If you are not sure how recent you need the information to be, do some background information on your topic to see if there have been any recent changes or legislation. For example, if you are researching same-sex marriage, older articles might say that it is not legal in every state since the US Supreme Court did not legalize marriage equality until June 2015.
    
4. What type of source is it? Consider what types of sources or information you need. For example, sometimes you may be asked to use only scholarly sources.

• Scholarly sources:

• For scholarly books, look at the publisher. (Is it a university press or other scholarly press? Do they describe their editorial process? You may need to Google the publisher to figure it out.) For scholarly articles, look at the title of the journal (not the article title). Learn more about determining if an article is scholarly.

• Books and articles: Articles tend to focus on a very specific issue or analysis, while books usually address a broader topic. (Note, however, that some books consist of a series of article chapters.) Often the record in a library database will indicate the item type, but you can also tell from the citation. 

• Research studies: This may only be relevant in courses which require that a specific type of research be used (quantitative, qualitative, experimental, systematic review, etc.). The abstract usually contains clues about the type of study. Most research studies also have a "Methods" section that describes how the research was conducted. 

Don't just pick the source at the top of your search results!

• Remember, search engines match words, not concepts. Some search engines and databases will sort search results by "relevance." This only means that there is an algorithm which uses measures like how many times your search words appear on the page, or whether they are in the title. The computer can't determine whether the source is actually relevant to you -- only you can do that. 

• Look for an abstract or summary that can tell you more about the source. 

• In a book, you might need to scan the table of contents or even read the preface or introduction.

• In a scholarly research article, read the abstract first - it should summarize the research. Then read the introduction, and the discussion and/or conclusion before diving into to the rest of the article. 

Is this book scholarly?

Finding more from what you have