CST 110 - Introduction to Communication (Hodgson - Alexandria)

Look carefully at several aspects of your source to determine how credible the source is.  For example:

• Author/Publisher Credentials: Who is the author, and what are the author's credentials?  Who is the publisher of the source, and what is their reputation and mission?
• Currency: How current is the source?  Is currency important for your research/assignment?
• Perspective: What is the source's perspective?  Is it presenting information objectively?  Is it advocating for a particular view (is there bias?)?  Sometimes you do want someone's opinion, but be sure to identify this perspective in your speech or paper.

For college coursework, instructors will often  require scholarly sources.

Learn more about how to identify how scholarly a source is:

This video, from North Carolina State University, discusses using some of the ideas on this page to evaluate the credibility of a source.

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.