Credibility: Identifying Reputable Sources for Papers and Projects

What's What? Indicators

What you are using has various key points or earmarks of quality:

For Web materials:

In most cases, there are no controls over what's out there on the Internet. That's why you need to be particularly careful about what to use.

What's the URL or web address? Where is the information coming from? What is the purpose of the information? Is the author making a profit from the pages (ads showing?)

  • Generally, a site with a domain name of ___.edu or ___.gov is more likely to be reputable than ___.com or ___.net materials. You still need to evaluate it, but it's one easy spot to check.
  • Blog sites like WordPress are only as reputable as the author; anyone can publish through them.
  • If an association is the publisher, who are they? what is their purpose? What is their agenda? are there possible biases inherent in having work published by them?
  • Is an author associated with the work? People should be willing to put their names on writing of good quality-- and it needs to be their real name!
  • Does the author or do the authors have experience or credentials that mean that they are more expert than the average person on the specific subject? I can write all day about some subjects and not be an expert, even though I have credentials and experience in my own fields of library science and education.

For journal articles, look for similar elements:

  • author? authors?
  • Where are they working?
  • Journal title?
  • Peer-reviewed?
  • Is their work supported by other sources?
  • Are their methods and illustrations/graphs/tables accurate and useful?
  • Is this particular publication useful to you?
  • Have you actually read it? Don't cite something you haven't read just to have a citation.
  • Publisher? Watch out for some questionable publishers; if they claim to be publishing hundreds or thousands of unrelated titles, how good can they be? Just be wary.

For books, some of the parameters are similar:

  • author? authors?
  • Where are they working?
  • Scholarly press? University press? Association press?
  • Is their work supported by other sources?
  • Are their methods and illustrations/graphs/tables accurate and useful?
  • Is this particular publication useful to you?
  • Have you actually read it? Don't cite something you haven't read.
  • Publisher? How good is the content? Just be wary.