For your Pre-Writing Annotated Bibliography (Oct 16), you will need:
For your case making paper (Dec 11), you will need:
Often when we are doing research, we are looking for certain types of sources. We categorize materials in three different ways depending on how they share information: Primary & Secondary Sources, Scholarly & Popular Sources, and Material Type.
The first way we often sort sources is by how they interact with the information they are presenting. Primary sources are written as a firsthand perspective. In a historical source, this would mean that the source would be presenting lived experiences; meanwhile, in a biology source, this would mean that the source is presenting observations or data gathered in the study. Secondary sources are materials that analyze or interpret primary sources. In history, this may be a source that summarizes an event and evaluates the factors and contexts; in biology, this could be a source that summarizes and collates several research studies. There is also a third level of sources when we categorize materials this way: tertiary sources, which are better known as reference materials. These sources provide short entries to introduce a concept or topic. Common reference sources are dictionaries, thesauruses, and encyclopedias.
For more information about primary & secondary sources and how to tell the difference, see the Primary vs Secondary Sources tutorial here.
A second way we sort sources is by how they share information, often in terms of their audiences and tone. Popular sources usually have a broader audience (often the general public), the purpose is to entertain readers or overview a subject, the design is usually more colorful in order to attract attention, and the language is general and less formal. Common examples of popular sources would be news articles, magazine articles, or social media posts, among others.
Scholarly sources (sometimes referred to as peer-reviewed or refereed sources), on the other hand, are usually intended for a specific audience of scholars and professionals in that field, the purpose is to publish new research and developments, the design will be more professional and plain, and the language will be more scholarly -- often using field-specific jargon and terminology. Common examples of scholarly sources would be journal articles and academic books.
You will often be asked to incorporate scholarly sources into your research while you are a student. There are many ways to ensure you are using scholarly sources, but the two main ways to do so would be to:
1. filter your search results (for example, in OneSearch, select "peer-reviewed journals")
2. evaluate the source yourself, using the above descriptions and distinctions to guide your evaluation (for example, look at the design and language of a source to determine an intended audience, or look at the publisher to determine what materials they publish)
For more information about popular and scholarly sources and how to tell the difference, see the Popular vs Scholarly Sources tutorial here.
A third way we generally sort sources is by medium or format of the material. This is usually the easiest way to sort sources because we are often already familiar with different types of materials: books, journal articles, news articles, social media posts, films, images, etc. As a student, you may be asked to research a specific medium or format, which will likely impact the research database you choose to complete the research. The library offers several databases that specialize in a specific medium/format, but the general databases and our OneSearch function can all be filtered by resource type as well.
An important part of the research process is evaluating sources to ensure they are credible; in this sense, we want to ensure the information they share is accurate and reliable. Another way to understand credibility is to assess how trustworthy a source may be.
One method we can use to help guide our evaluation process is the CRAAP Test. The following lists a few questions we can ask ourselves to help think about each aspect of the CRAAP test thoroughly.
Currency:
Relevance:
Authority:
Accuracy:
Purpose:
Another important aspect to consider while evaluating sources is the missing information, so sometimes we add an S to the end of the CRAAP Test:
Silences:
These Silences can help us pull different sources together in conversation, so that they fill the gaps within other sources.
Reminder: Lateral Reading Techniques are critical to ensuring accurate credibility evaluations.
Turning to materials and sources outside of the source you are evaluating to learn more and cross-examine the content of the source in question. Lateral reading can be especially helpful during the Currency, Authority, and Accuracy steps of the CRAAP test.
Note: You may still use un-credible sources as primary source examples (e.g. if you are researching misinformation, it may make sense to use a piece of propaganda as an example), but it is important to understand what you are looking at and think about why and how you choose to use each source.
The third step of the CRAAP Test asks us to critically review the authority of the source by taking a closer look at the author(s) and publisher(s). When we are digging into the background of the authors and publishers, it is important to remember that there is rarely only one sole authority on a topic and only one perspective -- so it is critical to balance different kinds of authority within our own academic work by using sources that incorporate multiple kinds of authority.
You could argue that there are countless different kinds of authority, but the different authorities tend to fall into three major categories:
Scholarly: expertise gained through education/training, publications, and academic credentials
Example: A research article about the impact of Greek life on college students' sense of community and belonging, published in a peer-reviewed Education journal by 2 economics professors and 1 sociology professor from three different universities.
Embodied: expertise drawn from the individual's identities
Example: A presentation about inclusive campus community practices given at an academic conference about student engagement by a panel of speakers who identify as disabled.
Experiential: expertise gathered from the experiences the individual went through
Example: A college newspaper article that interviews five students about the benefits and challenges of living in a new cooperative living house.
There are many other acronyms and tools we can use to guide us through evaluating sources beyond the CRAAP(S) Test. Others include:
Overall, each one will ask you to take a critical look at WHERE the information is coming from, WHO is sharing the information with you, and WHY the source was written. There is not one "best" resource to turn to -- as long as you are including these general aspects in your evaluation process, the exact way you do so doesn't matter.
Other Tools
This Interactive Media Bias Chart is a data visualization that displays measures of news (and “news-like”) articles and sources generated by analysts and staff of Ad Fontes Media. It reflects their most up-to-date ratings of all rated articles and shows over time.
This is probably the most comprehensive media bias resource on the Internet with 3300+ media sources currently listed in their database. They are also very transparent about their funding, methodology for evaluating sources, and their own internal corrections. What is particularly useful about this site is that it evaluates sources separately for bias and for facts.
Snopes.com is an independent publication owned by Snopes Media Group. Snopes provides fact-checking and original, investigative reporting based on evidence-based and contextualized analysis.
For more information on fact checking strategies, evaluating authority and bias, and other source evaluation techniques and tools, check out the Evaluating Sources tab in our expanded Introduction to Research guide.
Wikipedia is the biggest encyclopedia ever created. It exists in hundreds of languages. Anyone may contribute by writing or editing articles, and articles are developed over time, which means articles can be of varying quality. It is important for readers to recognize whether an article is a good or poor. To evaluate Wikipedia article quality, look in three places: the article's text and references, the article's "talk" page, and the page's edit history.
Again, when researching a topic, one of the first things you might do is head to an encyclopedia or Wikipedia to get a basic sense of what the topic is about or to find some keywords to use in a library database search. This is a good strategy!
For an academic report or presentation, however, you usually wouldn't cite Wikipedia itself, but rather you would cite the references that provide whatever information you're interested in. Doing this allows you and your professor to verify that your information is coming from a reliable source. Have a look at the below image, taken from the Black Lives Matter Wikipedia page, for an example of where to find references in a Wikipedia.
If for whatever reason you want to cite an entire Wikipedia page (for instance, because there are so many basic facts on it that it wouldn't make sense to cite each of the facts individually), always cite the Permanent link version of the page. This will provide a snapshot of the Wikipedia page in time, which is better for citation purposes than just citing a page that might (and will) change tomorrow.
