Initial Observations:
To get a quick, initial overview of a website, look at information on the website's "About Us" page, including information about authors, publisher, funders, and mission/purpose.
In-Depth Evaluation Strategy:
To dig deeper into the credibility and reliability of a website, you'll need to do more reading and investigating, including:
The video below, from the University of Louisville, discusses "lateral reading", which is a strategy professional fact-checkers use to determine how reliable an online source is.
Citizen Literacy was created by Robert Detmering, Amber Willenborg, and Terri Holtze for University of Louisville Libraries and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Look for:
Look for:
Is currency important for your topic?
Check the top or bottom of the webpage for a date.
Compare the information with what you've learned from other sources, including encyclopedias, books, periodical articles, or other websites.
Check to see if the website tells you what sources it used, such as books, periodical articles, other websites, or experts.
Any obvious sloppiness, such as spelling problems, typos, or dead links? If a website is sloppy in some areas, it may be sloppy in others -- such as accuracy.
What is the reputation of the author or organization?
Websites can be created for many purposes -- to entertain, to sell products, to educate or to advocate for a particular point of view are just some examples.
Check the website's "About Us" section for information on the site's purpose or mission.
Also check the domain name in the URL for insight into the site's mission. Here are examples of domain names associated with different types of organizations:
Objectivity and Bias -- Websites may take a particular point of view about a topic, so think about the tone that's used, and also find out what you can about the author or sponsoring organization and whether or not they have any biases or conflicts of interest. If the site discusses a controversial topic, does it discuss different points of view?
From Ohlone College
How Wikipedia CAN be useful in the beginning stages of research:
Why NOT to use Wikipedia for academic research: X The accuracy and authority of a Wikipedia article cannot be verified. |