HIST 1000 - History Matters (Dr. Homan)

Is this useful to your project? 

The first criteria that you'll likely use to evaluate a potential source is it's usefulness to your research project. Usefulness, or relevance, means evaluating the materials to determine:

1. Is this the type of information you need (ex. a research study or scholarly article)?
2. Is it related to your topic?
3. Is it detailed enough to help you answer questions on your topic?
4. Does the material support your argument or does it go against it? (both can be useful!)

Is it reliable & credible?

You, as a researcher, are responsible for evaluating every resource used to support your research topic - both for its credibility and reliability. In other words, your task as an academic is to exercise quality control over the resources you use.

Reliability & credibility can be examined using 4 key criteria: authority, objectivity, timeliness, and audience.

Authority

The author’s level of expertise on the topic he or she is writing about could take the form of an advanced degree and/or extensive experience in the field. A credible source often provides information about the author’s credentials. 

Objectivity

Another important component of a source’s credibility is its point of view, in particular its potential bias. Bias is an inaccurate or unfair presentation of information. In some cases, bias is intentional. A group with its own agenda may sponsor research or information, and this sponsorship may influence the results. Bias can also be unintentional. A writer’s perspective may prevent him or her from being able to see all sides of an issue. Sometimes you need unbiased facts to support your point. But other times you might want people’s opinions, and that’s OK as long as you acknowledge the source’s perspective in your work. While bias can be difficult to detect, be aware that it can exist in any kind of source, including things you find through the library. 

Timeliness

Consider when your source was published or last updated. Even something that was once high-quality can now be out-of-date and unsuitable for some purposes. If you need current statistics on the average cost of college in the United States, for example, a source published in the 1990s would be out of date. However, if you were looking at first-hand accounts of the American Civil War, a book published in the 1980s may be perfectly relevant.

Consider also that biases change over time and certain viewpoints were taken as fact not that long ago, which may now be considered egregiously biased opinions.

Audience

Many of your classes will require you to use only 'scholarly' sources, or a minimum number of these sources. This refers to the intended audience of the source: scholarly sources are intended for a scholarly or academic audience, whereas popular sources are intended for the general public.  Different audiences have different demands when it comes to things like the amount of detail relayed in the article, the credibility & reliability of the sources used (if any) to support the author's message, transparency about potential biases, engagement with other ideas or opinions in that field, and more.

In the academic publishing world, books and articles go through a rigorous editorial process in which an editor or group of scholars in that field evaluate the work’s quality. When it comes to journal articles, this process is called peer review. Peer-reviewed articles are considered high quality, because the review process helps to filter out sources that are written by unqualified or biased authors. By seeking out and using scholarly works, you're filtering sources to only include ones that have been deemed authoritative, reasonably objective, and well-researched.

As we discussed in the 'audience' section above, not all publications are the same. Scholarly publications are intended for a scholarly or academic audience, popular sources are intended for the general public, and, in-between the two, trade publications are intended for people who work in a certain industry so that they can keep up on the latest news, products, and services to help them do their jobs better. Since the information demands of each audience is different, each type of publication has different criterion for publication.