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Research Process: Step 3: Evaluate

No matter what stage of the research process you're at--only beginning, stuck in the middle, or finishing up with citation polishing--this guide is a great resource for you.

Evaluate Information

Step 3: When researching, it is important to find information that is reliable and appropriate for your project. 

Some assignments may require you to use types of sources such as primary or secondary sources or specific types of periodicals such as scholarly journals. Other assignments may require you to limit the number sources you use. Often Internet sources fall into this category.

In all cases, you should always evaluate the information included in your assignments.

Knowing how to evaluate information will help you with research assignments.

Check It Like a Pro

Don't know who to trust?  Use a search engine and lots of tabs to fact check your resource:

  1. Open a search engine, like Google.
  2. Type or copy/paste your author, organization, quote, or claim.
  3. Open new tabs for results that provide new or additional information (examples:  Wikipedia summaries, news articles, fact checking sites like Politifact or Snopes)
  4. Quickly skim several results; professional fact checkers read quickly and focus on key sections of webpages.  Look for inconsistencies or validations.
  5. Track back to any original or earlier findings:  fake news often re-uses images, and variations of similar content may reveal fabricated content.  
  6. Become a skeptic:  if a claim seems too good to be true, it probably is.  Keep searching!

Find more information on the Lateral Reading method and other evaluation tools on the Evaluating Resources LibGuide.

Evaluate Information using the CRAAP Test

Is it CRAAP?

Is it CRAAP? Evaluating Online Resources (PDF):

"When you search the Web, you’re going to find a lot of information . . . but is it accurate and reliable? You will have to determine this for yourself, and the CRAAP Test can help. The CRAAP Test is a list of questions you can ask yourself in order to determine if the information on a web site is reliable. Please keep in mind that the following list of questions is not static nor is it complete. Different criteria will be more or less important depending on your situation or need. So, what are you waiting for?" 

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