Newswriters, journalists, and law enforcement officers ask these questions when describing or investigating an event: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?
Who is the author? Do the author's authority, background, education and/or expertise make the information presented believable? Is the information primary or secondary? Is it from a scholarly or popular source? Can I use this information?
These same questions can be used to evaluate any information source that you use. Let's look at each question separately, and see how we might apply it to an information source, such as an article or a book, either in print or online.
WHO?
To evaluate an author's background or credentials, you may want to:After reading about the author, you can decide whether or not his or her writing can be used as an authoritative source to create or support your writing.
- Look for a description of the author within the publication. Frequently you will find something written about the author in the introductory section of a book, or at the beginning or end of a magazine, journal or newspaper article.
- Look to see if the author has written anything else on the subject by doing an author search in either a periodical index (such as Academic Search Elite on the library's web site) or a catalog of books and other materials.
- Look up a biography of the writer in a library reference book such as Contemporary Authors or Current Biography. As the titles suggest, these are good for living authors and ones who have published within the last 60 years or so (since the publications started that far back in time). For authors from an earlier time, there are other biographical sources in your library or on the Internet. Some living authors have their own web sites. A database called Literature Resource Center on your library's web site also contains biographical information.
- Look to see if the author's books were reviewed, by using Book Review Digest or Book Review Index. You can also find excerpts of reviews on the web sites of booksellers such as Barnes and Noble and Amazon. But, keep in mind that these booksellers want to sell the book, so you may not find anything unfavorable there. There are also many periodicals which publish book reviews, such as The New York Review of Books or the New York Times Book Review section.
There are specialized journals that only review books in a specific field or discipline. There are also annual reviews of outstanding research articles from scholarly journals in specific fields. To look up scholarly review publications in your field, ask a librarian.
WHAT?
What was written? Is the content useful or interesting? Does it make sense? Is it fact, fiction or opinion? Will it support your thesis? Can you write about it? Is is scholarly or professional? Is it primary or secondary information?Review these previous lessons:
Scholarly vs. General PeriodicalsRead the article, and in your mind summarize and evaluate the content, the gist, the story, the plot or whatever, and decide whether it's useful for your assignment. If it is, use it. If it's not, use something else. It's that simple. You're the judge!
Primary vs. Secondary Sources
