Chapter 5- Evaluating Sources

Section A of chapter 5 is about what factors you should use to evaluate a source. There are many things you need to do to evaluate sources including evaluating the relevance, the evidence, the author, the publisher, the timeliness, the comprehensiveness, and the genre.With evaluating the relevance you need to determine if the information in a source will help you address the readers' needs, interests, values and beliefs.When you evaluate the evidence of a source you need to ask yourself is it offers enough evidence, if it's the right kind of evidence offered, if the evidence is used fairly and if the source of the evidence is provided. Evaluating the author includes making sure that the author knows a lot about the topic they're discussing, what the author's affiliation is and making sure that you're aware of the bias the author is using in their information, ideas and arguments. When evaluating the publisher you have to be aware of how you can locate the information about the publisher and how the publisher's biases affect the information, ideas and arguments in the source. Evaluating the genre is asking yourself what style of writing does the genre use, how the evidence is used, how the genre is organized, what citation style is used and how the document is designed.

Section B of chapter 5 answers the question 'Should I evaluate all types of sources in the same way?' The answer is usually yes except when using digital and field sources, this can pose challenges during evaluation if you have the same process. To evaluate the relevance and credibility of digital sources you need to identify what type of source it is. Some examples are websites, blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook, newsgroups, and discussion forums. An easy way to assess the credibility is to look at the domain, safe ones are usually .edu and .md and some others that can sometimes be questionable are .com. To evaluate the credibility of field sources such as interviews, correspondence, observations, and surveys, you must pose some questions. Some of these questions include 'are the questions you asked during and interview relevant to your research topic?' 'Is the info you collected in an observation still relevant and are your notes as complete as you first hoped?' 'How qualified are the individuals that you questioned?' 'Were the questions that were answered int the interviews answered honestly?' and last but not least 'Did survey respondents have enough time to answer adequately?'