2.3 Evaluating Sources

For this class (and most college courses), you'll be doing scholarly research (also sometimes called academic research). We'll continue going over this next week, but this week we'll be starting with some definitions and a worksheet on how to evaluate online resources.

What is scholarly research? 

Scholarly research should be:

• Written by an expert in the field (or an organization that employs experts, like the National Institute of Health)

  • In other words, if you are researching the impact of caffeine on studying, a medical doctor or scientist who studies this would be an expert in this field. 

• Peer-reviewed or written by an organization that has teams that peer review each others work.

  • In other words, the article should have been looked at by someone else before being published to ensure it's accurate and meets academic rigor (standards of the field for research)

• Cited

  • If the author of the article is explaining research that's been done on the topic, it should explain where that author got that information. Did they do the study themselves? Or did they pull the results from someone else's study? You should be able to find this information. 

Evaluating Sources

Along with the above criteria, your sources should also fulfill the following requirements: 

• Be Timely

  • What is "timely" will depend largely on your topic, but the research you choose will need to be recent enough that it's reasonably safe to say that it's still valid (there haven't been large changes or lots of new research since).

    • For example, a research paper looking at the impact of cell phone use on drivers should look at research from the past 5-7 years. Why? Because flip phones or Blackberry devices were likely used differently by drivers than smartphones. So, any research done in 2005 may not be applicable to today's issues. On the other hand, research looking the mental health benefits of dog ownership from 2005 is likely still fine.

    • Topics that will likely need to be more careful about being very recent: anything in the medical, mental health, technological, scientific fields, and anything that might have been impacted by major events (such as the pandemic). 

  • For any field/topic, there are new studies being done every year that adds to our understanding of different fields and topics, so you should try to stick to the last 15 years even if your topic is something that has not changed substantially.

    • Additionally, society changes over time, so an article about schools in 1970 or working moms from 1980 would likely have major areas where it's no longer relevant.

    • These articles CAN be used as background, however, if something in your argument would benefit from establishing how ideas about an issue have changed. Old articles should not be used to support arguments about present day. 

• Be Relevant to Your Topic

  • Make sure that your research is relevant to your topic.

  • Some examples:

    • If you are looking at the impact of the cost of college textbooks on students, you should be focusing on U.S.-based research, since textbook cost, economics, and other factors will differ by country.

    • If you are looking at the impact of pet ownership on mental health, make sure that the articles aren't getting too specific. For example, if you find 4 articles on the impact of pet ownership on bipolar patients, but your overall argument is on general mental health and well-being, then those articles aren't relevant to your topic. If you had an article on pet ownership and anxiety and another on pet ownership and depression, that might work (depending on the articles), but some medical articles will get too specific for those more general arguments. 

The CRAAP Test

When we get to library research, like academic books and academic journals, these three criteria will have already been met. But when we're looking at the great expanse of the internet, it's often hard to determine what counts as academic research and what doesn't. This is where the CRAAP test comes in. 

The CRAAP test was developed by a librarian in California, and is an incredibly helpful tool for evaluating internet research. Once you get the ideas down, I recommend that you use the concepts in not only any research you need to do for school, but also for real-life when you are trying to learn about new concepts. If you are watching a YouTube video or reading an article about a topic, it's important to be able to gauge where that information is coming from and whether it's free of bias. 

For our class, any internet research you use for your research paper will need to pass the CRAAP test. Sources like newspaper articles will automatically be disqualified by some of the criteria (such as written by an expert in the field, as they are written by reporters and journalists and not academic experts).

You may find that it's much easier to use the academic databases and Google Scholar (which we'll be going over last week) than try to find well-cited research on the internet. There's a lot of "crap" to sift through, as many of you already know. But even if you only use academic journal articles that you found through Google Scholar for this paper, I'd like you to familiarize yourself with the concepts here. These are good criteria for any type of research you do in life or in school.

The following worksheet shows the criteria for the CRAAP test. There's an explanation on the first page and a worksheet on the back that you can do for any sources you'd like to use for class.

Note: you will not need to use the CRAAP test for research you find in an academic journal or academic book; these can be found through the Library databases and Google Scholar, which we'll be going over next week.