Library Resources for Behavioral & Social Sciences: Evaluating Sources

It's always important to evaluate a source. Evaluating a source means checking that source to make sure that it is credible and reliable. This means that the sources you use should not make any false claims, should be written by someone who knows what they’re talking about, and should contain information that relates directly to your topic.

You might be asking: "Why should I evaluate a source that I found using library resources? I thought scholarly journal articles were automatically okay?" 

And those are great questions! However, even good, credible sources might not be the best choices for your exact research needs. Every time you research for a different assignment, you will have different research needs--you may need reliable websites instead of scholarly journal articles, and your topic will be different than the last time you researched. This means that you need to evaluate whether the sources you find are good for your exact purposes as you are researching.

For example, would you rather read a scholarly journal article on ocean pollution that is written by a marine biologist or one written by a historian? If you answered "marine biologist," you're on the right track! A historian might have a PhD and know a lot about their subject, they aren't an authority on ocean pollution like a marine biologist might be. Evaluating a source's author for authority like this is part of the evaluation process.