UNIV 1301 - Avalos: Evaluate Sources

It is critical to evaluate your sources for your college assignments.  Your professors expect you to gather information that is of high quality and comes from authoritative sources. Therefore you need to evaluate efficiently every information source you come across.

Always check for:

1. Authority
2. Accuracy
3. Objectivity
4. Currency
5. Relevance

This tutorial offers some general guidelines about how to treat information you find on the internet.

No one else will make sure you find credible/reliable information online except you, so be picky about it!

At the bare minimum, make sure you can identify the following things on a web site:

• the date it was posted/updated
• who wrote it (bonus points if you can Google that person/organization to see if they're a credible source of info)
• why the info on the site was written (is it opinion, persuasion, or just informative? Check he site's "about us" section)

Here are some more in-depth questions you can ask yourself to figure out whether you're looking at a high-quality web site:

Take Control of Your Google Search!