Comm 1100 Research Tips
(From the Online Library Learning Center at http://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/)______
1. Evaluating Web Sources - Guidelines
Evaluating all sources used in research is essential, but there are some special guidelines you should follow when evaluating Web sites:
Question to Ask / Why Is It Important? / Where to Find It? /Who wrote the document? / Your source should be reliable. / On the Web page
On whose Web site does the document appear? / If the organization is biased or has an agenda, you need to scrutinize the material very carefully. / Ask a reference librarian for help locating information on organizations.
Can you verify the information elsewhere? / You want information that can be verified in more than one source. / Look at other sources; If a Web site states that a cure for diabetes has been found, you should be able to find that same information in another source.
When was the page last updated? / Currency of information is essential for some topics such as science and medicine. If you are doing research on current treatments for diabetes, you want current information. / On the Web page.
Bad signs
§ The Web site on treatments for diabetes was last updated in 1997.
§ You find a Web site stating the United States has declared war on Canada, but you cannot find any information in any other news source verifying the fact.
2. Evaluating Internet Information - "dot com" "dot gov" suffixes and country codes explained
Any information that you use to support ideas and arguments in a research paper should be given some scrutiny. Printed materials that are collected in a library go through an evaluative process as librarians select them to include in their collections. There is also an evaluation of Web sites that are included in search directories, such as Yahoo!, at least to the extent of classifying and placing sites into a categorization scheme. However, sites harvested by "spiders" or "robots" for search engines don't go through any evaluative process.
There are no real restrictions or editorial processes for publishing information on the Web, beyond some basic knowledge of Web page creation and access to a hosting computer. Anyone can publish opinion, satire, a hoax, or plainly false information. To insure that the Web sites you use as information sources are acceptable for research purposes, you should ask questions about those sites. The following are some elements you should look at before deciding to use a Web site as a research resource:
Domain suffixThe term "dot.com" has become a ubiquitous phrase in the English language. The "dot.com" really refers to the domain of a Web site. Sites on the Web are grouped by their URLs according to the type of organization providing the information on the site. For example, any commercial enterprise or corporation that has a Web site will have a domain suffix of .com, which means it is a commercial entity.
The domain suffix provides you with a clue about the purpose or audience of a Web site. The domain suffix might also give you a clue about the geographic origin of a Web site. Many sites from the United Kingdom will have a domain suffix of .uk.
Here follows a list of the most common domain suffixes and the types of organizations that would use them.
.com
Commercial site. The information provided by commercial interests is generally going to shed a positive light on the product it promotes. While this information might not necessarily be false, you might be getting only part of the picture. Remember, there's a monetary incentive behind every commercial site in providing you with information, whether it is for good public relations or to sell you a product outright.
.edu
Educational institution. Sites using this domain name are schools ranging from kindergarten to higher education. If you take a look at your school's URL you'll notice that it ends with the domain .edu. Information from sites within this domain must be examined very carefully. If it is from a department or research center at a educational institution, it can generally be taken as credible. However, students' personal Web sites are not usually monitored by the school even though they are on the school's server and use the .edu domain.
.gov
Government. If you come across a site with this domain, then you're viewing a federal government site. All branches of the United States federal government use this domain. Information such as Census statistics, Congressional hearings, and Supreme Court rulings would be included in sites with this domain. The information is considered to be from a credible source.
.org
Traditionally a non-profit organization. Organizations such as the American Red Cross or PBS (Public Broadcasting System) use this domain suffix. Generally, the information in these types of sites is credible and unbiased, but there are examples of organizations that strongly advocate specific points of view over others, such as the National Right to Life Committee and Planned Parenthood. You probably want to give this domain a closer scrutiny these days. Some commercial interests might be the ultimate sponsors of a site with this suffix.
.mil
Military. This domain suffix is used by the various branches of the Armed Forces of the United States.
.net
Network. You might find any kind of site under this domain suffix. It acts as a catch-all for sites that don't fit into any of the preceding domain suffixes. Information from these sites should be given careful scrutiny.
AuthorityDoes the site you're evaluating give credit to an author? If no responsible author is listed, is there an indication of any sponsorship? When trying to determine reliability of information given in any medium, you want to have some idea of what the author's credentials are. Are they experts on the topic they are writing about? What is their educational background? Remember, anyone can publish on the Web. They don't have to know what they're talking about. You also want to check and see if there's a list of sources given for the information on a site, like a bibliography that you would have to provide for a paper you're writing.
Currency Information that is outdated may be incorrect or incomplete. A well maintained Web site will generally tell you at the bottom of the initial screen when it was last updated and maybe even when it was originally created and made available on the Web.
Links An informational Web site in which all the hyperlinks are broken might not be a very reliable resource. Broken hyperlinks are not uncommon, due to the ever changing nature of the Web, but when there are many broken links on a Web site, it might be an indication that the site isn't maintained on a regular basis.
URLThe site address can give you clues as to ultimate sponsorship of a site. If you can't determine who wrote the site or who or what is sponsoring the site, try truncating the URL to its root address. This will tell you where the site is being hosted. For example, this site provides information on nutritional RDAs:http://www.mikeschoice.com/reports/rda.htm.
If you truncate the URL to its root address http://www.mikeschoice.com, you will discover that this is a site selling a mineral supplement. Given the obvious bias, this is probably not the best source of nutritional information.
Another clue to what type of site you're looking at is whether there is a ~ (tilde) symbol in the URL. This symbol usually indicates that the site is a personal Web page and the information should be given careful scrutiny.
ComparisonAlways compare the information that you find on a Web site with other information sources. Generally, you wouldn't want to use only Web sites as support for a research paper, so you would be looking at other types of sources such as books, magazine articles, etc. as well. How does the information found in the various formats compare?
3. GALILEO vs. The Web – They Are Not the Same
GALILEO is found on the Web, but it's not the same as a Web pageGALILEO is a Web site that is a collective of information databases. This information is mostly from previously published printed sources, specifically periodical literature (magazines, newspapers, professional journals). Because this previously published information has undergone a certain amount of editorial scrutiny, you can rely on information from GALILEO to be more credible. That's not to say that you shouldn't apply some evaluative questions to the information in GALILEO, but that you can trust that the writers of the information are generally professional journalists or experts in a field of knowledge. GALILEO also includes a collection of Internet Resources selected by libraries.
The Web is truly a democratic medium. You don't have to have any qualifications to publish on the Web; you don't have to undergo an editorial process to have your site published by a host computer; you don't even have to give factual, verifiable, useful information. You can publish pictures of your cats, if you want to. Anything goes, and often does, on the Web. It's the wild frontier of information.
GALILEO is a fortress in the wilds of the Internet. Personal Web sites and commercial interest sites aren't allowed into the fortress. So, you can have some peace of mind when using the information gathered from the GALILEO databases. You still have to question the information provided, but at least you know that it has been questioned already.
Your professor may require that you use no more than one or two Internet resources for your research. This confuses some students when they are using GALILEO articles as resources. Although GALILEO is indeed an Internet resource, the information provided there has a printed paper counterpart that was published first. GALILEO articles are hard copy printed words that have been digitized and made available on the Internet through GALILEO.
4. Analyzing Web Sources - Tips for Weeding Out Web Sites as You Go
1. Keep in mind what you are trying to accomplish in your research. Does the source have relevance to the question you are trying to answer?
2. Consider the audience for your research, as well as the audience for which the article you are reading was intended. If you can't understand a word of it, it won't help you. But if your research is of a scholarly nature, some use of the language of the discipline is expected.
3. Analyze, when possible, at every step of the evaluation process. A source that seemed good at the beginning of your research may not be useful to you once your topic has become more focused.
4. Practice, practice, practice — "the more you analyze, the easier it gets."
5. Magazine vs. Scholarly Journal – Differences Between These Sources
Magazine or scholarly journal?
Characteristic / Magazine / Scholarly Journal /Advertising / Extensive / Selective or none
Appearance / Slick, glossy, attractive / Plain cover, usually
Articles / Frequently, no author indicated or author is journalist; length usually short / Authors included; usually includes some biographical information on author; ALWAYS includes references/sources; usually includes abstract and methodology sections; usually lengthy
Audience / Written for general audience / Written for researchers, professionals in field
Authors / Written by various authors, frequently journalists / Written by scholars or professionals in a particular field
Distribution / Wide; general public / Limited
Evaluation / By journalists / By professionals in the same field as subject of article (" Peer-reviewed" ); indicates reliability and credibility of article
Graphics / Color photographs, illustrations or drawings to enhance the publication's image / Graphs, charts, tables, other graphics to enhance or illustrate the article
Language / Simpler language designed to reach a large audience with various educational levels / Terminology of the discipline or subject covered; reader is assumed to have similar, scholarly background
Publisher / Published for profit / Published for professional association or scholarly press
Sources / May list sources / MUST include sources
Bad signs
· A magazine article cites statistics (" 22% of all Americans have been abducted by aliens" )... without giving a source for the information.
· A seemingly important study is only published in a non-peer reviewed publication
6. Objective Reasoning – Information or Propaganda
Information or propaganda?
QUESTION: Does the information appear to be fact or fiction?
Is there evidence to support the facts? For most research, you only want fact based information. How do you tell the difference between fact and fiction? Can you track down the sources in the footnotes, or does the author cite mainly conversations or other unpublished or obscure sources? Does the bibliography list a number of different writers and publications, or rely heavily on one or two sources? Can you find other sources with similar information? Be especially careful of Web sites that make undocumented claims that you cannot verify elsewhere.
QUESTION: Is there bias?
Does the information appear to be slanted? Does it present only one side of the story? There may be times when you recognize information is biased and you want (need) to use it in your research. Usually when you are using biased information, you will want to find sources on both sides of the issue. For example, if you are looking at information on genetically modified foods, you could look at sources from both Greenpeace, an organization that strongly opposes them, and Monsanto a company that develops genetically modified seeds.