Need Help?
For individual research help, schedule an appointment to meet with a librarian.
Google Search Tips
- Put phrases in quotation marks: "paralegal careers" Virginia
- To search for your terms just in the titles of web pages, type intitle: in front of your terms.
For example: Intitle:"paralegal careers" Virginia
- Limit your results to websites from a certain domain, such as .edu or .org:, by typing site: in front of the domain. For example:
"paralegal careers" site:.edu
"paralegal careers" site:.org
"paralegal careers" site:.gov
Evaluate Websites
Who is the author?
What are his/her qualifications?
Why was the website created?
When was it last updated?
How reliable is the information?
In-Depth Website Evaluation
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:
- fact-checking
- learning what other sources say about the website (lateral reading)
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.