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For individual research help, schedule an appointment to meet with a librarian.
Search Engine Tips
Put phrases in quotation marks:
To search for your terms just in the titles of web pages, type intitle: in front of your terms.
Limit your results to certain domains (e.g., .edu, .gov, .org)
Search for the websites of organizations you read about in articles -- these organizations often have useful information.
How to Evaluate Websites
Initial Observations:
To get a quick, initial overview of a website, look at information on the website's "About Us" page.
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.