Being able to critically evaluate the information we encounter on the web is a valuable research skill. Why? So much information can be found online and not everything we read is true. Sometimes information can be narrowly accurate, yet still be so biased, selective, or leading as to make the information essentially useless for research purposes. Some information may have once been accurate but is now simply too out-of-date to be useful. Sometimes the authors of an article are not experts on what they are writing about. And sometimes the problem is not the accuracy of the information, it’s the lack of research-quality detail and substance.
Being a critical consumer of information is helpful not only in school but also in our daily lives. Just as we need the information in our college papers to be based on reliable, quality sources, we also want the health advice, product reviews, and other kinds of information we personally use to be reliable.
Video courtesy of NCSU Libraries. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.
When evaluating information, here are some questions to consider:
Adapted from: Information Literacy Concepts: An Open Educational Resource. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BYNC-SA 4.0) Adapted from Mastering Academic Research developed at Florida Institute of Technology. Adapted from Research Foundations from Seminole State College of Florida Library.