Library Guides: Evaluating Information and Fake News: Getting Started

Welcome

Now that you have found some literature resources the next question has to be:

“Should I use this information?”

Not all information is created equal. Some information is more equal than others.

Your task is to sort out what is good, reliable, academically sound, rigorously researched information.

Don’t panic. It is not as hard as it seems and, there is a lot of data available to help you sort the good from the bad and ugly.

How Can I Tell

There are several techniques you can use to assess the academic quality and reliability of resources before spending time reading/viewing/listening to them:

Peer review – has it been assessed by respected academics in the field? See the Peer Review tab.
Use evaluation criteria - see the CRAAP Test tab for tests you can use to evaluate your sources.
Impact measures – refers to tools and sources you can use to evaluate quality based on citation counts and wider interest counted in social media. See this tab for more information about bibliometric and altimetric measures of objective quality.

Watch this video on Lateral Reading from the University of Louisville.

Scale image adapted from Toby Hudson's Brass weight scales with cupped trays. Created with POV-ray. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brass_scales_with_cupped_trays.png. CC BY-SA 4.0.