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, 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:

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.

Wikipedia and Academic Research

How Wikipedia CAN be useful in the beginning stages of research:

	A basic overview of your topic.
	Important names, vocabulary and keywords related to your topic.
	Table of contents for some entries, helping you to understand how your topic can be organized.
	References and other websites that may be helpful (though you will need to evaluate them to be sure).

Why NOT to use Wikipedia for academic research:

X The accuracy and authority of a Wikipedia article cannot be verified.