Evaluate Your Resouces
Analyze and evaluate your search results.
Is what you've found authoritative, accurate, objective, up-to-date, scholarly information on your research topic?
The following links will help:
- How to Critically Analyze Information Sources.
A list of some of the key questions you should ask when you consider the appropriateness of a particular book, article, media resource, or Web site for your research. - Distinguishing Scholarly from Non-Scholarly Periodicals: A Checklist of Criteria.
Shows how to evaluate periodicals by looking at their format, intended audience, and appearance. - Evaluating Web Resources
Ways to analyze the Websites you find. - The Shifting Forms of Deception
The guide at this link will give you tools to distinguish accepted truth from personal fabrication, using the treachery (and sometimes entertainment) of genuinely "fake news" as examples.
Even if the materials you've found pass the evaluation checks, continue to be critical!
Just because it's written in a book doesn't mean that it's the one and only truth. Authors are human beings like any other, subject to limitations both personal and of their historical moment--including unexamined bias, blind spots, hubris, wishful thinking, error. Don't close yourself off to learning from an expert, but at the same time, remain skeptical about the author's position and what may be lacking, forced, or inconsistent in it.