LibGuides: First-Year Experience Research Guide: Evaluate

Important note

On this page you will find two boxes - one for tutorials and short quizzes related to the evaluation process and another for important resources. Within each box are tabbed pages (think tabbed dividers within a notebook!). Be sure to click on each tab to review all the information you need.

Learning Objectives for EVALUATE

Explain the differences between scholarly and nonscholarly sources and how information from these sources might be used.
Relate the information need and search strategy to the appropriate information source.
Evaluate information on a variety of factors (i.e., timeliness, relevancy, accuracy, authority, purpose, and your own bias) using various methods (i.e., lateral reading) to ensure credibility.

Click on upper right hand corner of video screen for a menu.

Entire tutorial runs 8.69 minutes.

Individual sections:

Evaluation (0:45)
Scholarly journals (2:38)
Non-scholarly periodicals (2:30)
Websites (2:46)
Social media (1:10)

Identifying Source Types Quiz: https://ccsu.libwizard.com/id/d46566729fbecfb2214d5eeb3cbaf54f

Tutorial on Lateral Reading (7:58) (Brandon Wilkinson, Chemeketa Community College)
"A video created to help students evaluate sources that they find online using the lateral reading technique used by professional fact checkers."

Lateral Reading Quiz: https://ccsu.libwizard.com/id/2c3cd094ceda1a628941fa395613f605

EVALUATE - Resources

How to Read a Scholarly Journal Article

Interactive Visual of a Scholarly Article
This site, created by the librarians at North Carolina State University and linked in the document above, provides an interactive visual for the different parts of a scholarly article along with explanations of what is found in each section.

Everyone tells you that doing research well takes a good chunk of time, but I promise you that doing research poorly takes even longer! Want to make good use of your research time? Don't read every article with a title that sounds like it might be relevant to you.

(You read that correctly. I said don't.)

Instead, evaluate every step of the way to see if what you're looking at is something you might use. Let's say you've done a search in Academic Search Premier...

BEFORE YOU CLICK:

Look at the subjects associated with the article. These are used to describe the article, like tags. Do these sound relevant to your topic?
Look at the resource type icon. This tells you what kind of source you would be looking at (a newspaper article, magazine article, report, a government document, a web resource, or a journal article). Is it the type you want?

And then, after you click...

BEFORE YOU READ:

Look at the abstract! You can read the short abstract to get a sense of what the article says. This is a full overview -- no cliff-hangers, no secrets. This will help you decide whether you might want to use it for your research.

screenshot of academic search premier with article abstract circled