Evaluating the Information You Find

Evaluating the quality of the information that you find in searching is a crucial component of the research process. While many articles, books, and websites contain reliable information, you need to be able to identify biased, incomplete, or inaccurate information when you find it. You also need to know which resources are most likely to provide you with high-quality information. This unit will give you a brief introduction to these skills, and provide you with links for learning more.

Evaluating Web Resources

While Web pages can obviously be a very useful source of information, many lack the quality assurance that editors and fact checkers often provide for books and journals, and that librarians provide when selecting materials for library collections. It is very important when doing research on the Web to evaluate each site carefully to insure that you do not cite outdated, biased, or inaccurate information in your work. Please take a moment to read through the library's Guide to Evaluating Internet Resources, which provides an easy-to-use checklist of questions that you can use to determine the quality of the information found on any Web page. These questions include:

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Using Scholarly Articles

Articles and books written by professors, researchers, or university students that have been reviewed by authorities in their academic disciplines before publication are generally referred to as being scholarly. The terms peer reviewed or refereed are also often used to describe literature of this type. Examples of journals that publish scholarly articles are American Journal of Psychology, Modern Fiction Studies, and Sloan Management Review. Peer review of articles and books is done with the goal of eliminating errors of fact and interpretation, and of insuring that only high-quality literature is published. For this reason, using scholarly articles in your research generally guarantees that the information you find there will be accurate and well-researched. For more information on how a peer reviewed article is evaluated, please see the University of North Florida's page What is a Refereed/Peer-reviewed Article?

• Article type: Is it a detailed research article containing standard scholarly features such as an abstract, in-text citations, and a list of works cited?
• Authors: Are the authors clearly identified and their credentials given? Do their credentials identify them as authorities on the topic on which they've written?
• Audience: Based on the writing style and level of reader knowledge assumed, does the intended audience appear to be researchers, students, professors, or other members of an academic or professional community?
• Publisher Was the article published by a college, university, or professional association for members of these communities? If not, does the publisher's website show that they largely publish materials that appears to be intended for these communities?

  For a detailed list of features to look for when trying to determine whether an article is scholarly, please see Information and Library Services' Guide to Identifying and Locating Scholarly Journals. These guidelines can also be used to determine if a book your have found in your searching is scholarly.

  A useful tool for determining whether an article is scholarly is the library database Ulrich's Periodicals Directory (under U on the Articles & More: Library Databases and E-Journals page). Ulrich's does not contain articles - instead, it lists information about journals. If you know the exact title, enter the title of the journal in the search box, then select "Title (Exact)" in the dropdown menu and click on the Submit button. In the results list, if a referee's shirt icon appears next to the journal title, the articles that appear in that journal can generally be considered refereed and scholarly:

  

  You can also click on the hyperlinked journal title. On the following page, if you look under the field called "Document Type", you will see the words "academic/scholarly" if the journal is scholarly. You may also see other document types such as consumer, etc. that indicates the publication should be considered popular, or intended for a general, non-professional audience.

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  Locating Scholarly Articles
  
  The databases subscribed to by UMUC Information and Library Services contain tens of thousands of scholarly articles, the majority of which are not freely available on the Web. A number of these databases allow you to limit your searches to only scholarly articles, making it easier to find reliable information on your topic. They include:

  • Expanded Academic ASAP, Health Reference Center, and PROMT. In these databases, limit your search to scholarly journals by selecting Limit the search to: refereed publications.
    
  • Academic Search Premier, PsycINFO, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, and Health Source Nursing/Academic Edition. In these databases, select Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals.
    
  • ABI Inform and Proquest Computing. In these databases, select Limit results to: Scholarly journals, including peer-reviewed.

  All of these databases can be accessed from the Articles & More: Library Databases and E-Journals page. Here's an example of how to limit to scholarly sources in the EBSCO database Academic Search Premier:

  

  Other databases may not have a feature that lets you search for scholarly publications only, but they may nonetheless contain scholarly journals. For example, most of the journals indexed in PsycARTICLES and ScienceDirect are considered scholarly. Please see the section above, "Determining if an Article is Scholarly", for information on using Ulrich's Periodicals Directory to determine if articles that you find in such databases are scholarly.

  Two important things to keep in mind:

  • Publication in a scholarly or refereed journal does not necessarily guarantee a particular article has been peer reviewed. For example, scholarly journals may publish book reviews or editorial commentary that do not undergo a peer review or referee process. If you have any questions about whether or not a particular article can be considered scholarly, you can always contact a UMUC librarian for help.

  • Magazines and journals that do not subject their articles to peer-review are generally referred to as popular or general interest publications. Articles in publications of this type can be very useful sources of information, but need to be read more critically that those in peer-reviewed publications. You may want to read several articles on the same topic from various popular publications, and investigate the author's credentials, to get a feel for whether the information you've found seems complete and credible.

  ¹The above criteria are based in part on Cornell University Library's "Seven Steps to Effective Library Research" (http://www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/research/tutorial.html).

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