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.

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 -  to make sure you select the RIGHT resources and avoid using CRAAP ones. 
  • R - Relevant to your topic
  • I - Irreproachable in that they are accurate and not flawed. 
  • G - Good quality resources that are authoritative and/or peer reviewed.
  • H - Help to support the purpose of your research or assignment
  • T - Timely relevance to your work.
• 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.

Using poor quality sources will reduce the credibility and reliability of your work.  It may even result in you reaching the wrong conclusions.

This can have a serious impact on your work and may even result in greater harm as demonstrated in this video...

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