College Research and Writing Tutorial

Evaluating sources

The question everyone asks librarians is, "How do I find good sources?" The answer nobody likes to hear is, "it depends." What makes a source "good" depends heavily on what you're using that source for. Although we'll mostly talk about this in the context of writing, all of these same ideas apply to other forms of creating like filming videos or hosting a podcast.

The following two activities will walk you through evaluating the creator, audience, medium, and purpose of both your own writing as well as the sources you'll use to support your writing. Evaluating your own writing first is essential for figuring out which sources you've evaluated are the best ones to use in your own writing - choosing a source based on how well it meets your needs is far better than finding a source and then trying to figure out how to use it. Click the hotspots in the images below to learn some questions you can ask yourself about both your own writing and the sources you find.

Things to note

• While it's important to consider these 4 aspects of sources separately, they're all interconnected, too.
  • Audience and medium are often closely linked. A group of academics will have different expectations of a conference presentation than they will of the journal article the presentation discusses.
  • Similarly, medium and purpose can be closely linked. YouTube is mostly known for its entertaining content for a general audience, but academic webinars are often uploaded to YouTube for ease of sharing.
  • Any time you change one of these things, the others may change as well.
• It's important to keep in mind that there are no bad source types, only types that are more or less suited for your audience, medium, and purpose.
  • Social media posts are not bad sources of information if you're writing an academic paper on social media.
  • Even fake news articles are good sources if you're writing about fake news.
  • Using unconventional source types that are still appropriate for your audience, medium, and purpose is a great way of producing more interesting research.
• Ultimately, the best sources are the ones that are most relevant to your writing and also not redundant when taken as a whole. 
  • Try to find sources that offer something unique to your research, whether that's perspective, data, or even just source type.