EvaluatingInformation Materials

Two MinuteTutorials

(or less)

This tutorial will attempt to give you a very quick overview of some of the methods for evaluating resources.

All information is fine, so long as it is used appropriately.

Essentially, you must consider the following points:• Types of information• Your own information needs• Currency of information• Previous review of information• Obvious biases of the authors• Collecting other opinions about the information

First, you must understand what are the types of information and what are your own information needs.

Types of information:• Primary Source• Secondary Source• Reference Source

(See more information at: Places to Find Information)

You can use all sources for your papers, but it is important that you use all sources appropriately.

Currency of information: Date of publication & Edition

When evaluating any information resource, you must first of all, consider the currency of the information. This is done most simply by considering:Date of publication & Edition

Date of publication is still not all that simple. While this book from 1914 may not be the best source to discuss the current foreign policy of Italy, it may be the perfect book for other purposes.

Currency of information: Date of publication & Edition

On the other hand, an engraving of one of the fountains in front of the Vatican may be as “current” as any today.

This one is from 1675.

From: Le fontane di Roma nelle piazze, e luoghi publici della città, con li loro prospetti, come sono al presente / Giovanni Battista Falda ; Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi [Hrsg.], [1675]. 2. Le fontane delle ville di Frascati, nel Tusculano con li loro prospetti, [1675] http://www.biblhertz.it/cgi-bin/gucha_de.pl?t_idn=bi267r

Currency of information: Date of publication & Edition

Editions are simpler to deal with:

A later edition is supposed to completely replace an earlier edition.

12th ed. 13th ed.

Previous Review of information

Then, has it gone through peer-review (or refereed), has it been edited, or has there been no process at all?

For more information see: The Scholarly Publication ProcessHow to find peer-reviewed journal articles

What do others say of the information?

Are there any book reviews?

Hmmm…

Who is the author? What are the biases of the author? There is nothing wrong with bias since everyone has biases, but how does that bias enter what you are reading?

Does the author work for a think tank?(What is a think tank? See: Think-tank Publications)

Is the author writing on his or her specialty?

For example, Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at MIT and also writes articles and books about controversial political topics.

We normally would evaluate his writings about linguistics in a different way from his writings about, e.g. U.S. foreign policy.

An excellent tool for getting an idea of the author is WorldCat Identities, a service provided by OCLC.

The easiest way to search WorldCat Identities is to use the Extend Search function of the catalog.See a Two-Minute Tutorial on Extending the Search.

Search for the author’s name using the Extend Search, and select Synonyms/Other Tools.

This will search WorldCat Identities automatically.

You may find several people with the same name, but choose the one that seems to be the best match. You may have to look at a few to decide which one is your author.

You will get some basic information distilled from the WorldCat catalog. This is the largest bibliographic database in the world containing thousands of participating libraries, including some of the world’s greatest libraries.

There can be a lot of information on these pages.

It will tell you the items by the author, and which are the ones held in the most libraries.

Sometimes there is even a link into a Wikipedia page on the person.

From this information, we can conclude that Noam Chomsky is probably an important

author since his books are held so widely.

If you want to search WorldCat, you can choose World Libraries from the

Extend Search options.

Finally,each book or article has original information, plus citations to other materials. (if there are no citations, that’s a clue) One article may be viewed as primary source material, but still have a tremendous list of citations! Lots of blogs are like this.

In Noam Chomsky’s book mentioned earlier, while you may or may not agree with what he writes in his book, he has 30 pages of bibliography which may be just what you need!

Blogs are primary sources (i.e. unedited, not peer-reviewed).

Wikipedia is different, some editing by unknown “experts,” but all can be changed in the next 10 seconds. Treat essentially like a blog.

It doesn’t matter what format the information is in. These methods will always work.

Two MinuteTutorials

(or less)

EvaluatingInformation Materials

See also: Finding Peer-Reviewed PublicationsPlaces to Find Information Academic Skills for Success in Scholarly Research

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