Chapter 5-Evaluating Sources

Chapter 5 in Bedford Researcher is all about reviewing and evaluating your sources. There are many factors that you should consider when evaluating your source. Making sure it is relevant to your topic is a big one. If you include things from your source that doesn't directly relate to your topic your paper could start to go in a different direction than you had intended, and your readers won't be able to understand what you are trying to say. This goes along with evaluating evidence, is there enough evidence to prove the points made in the source? And is it the right type of evidence? Another way to evaluate a source is by looking at the author. Is the author someone who knows what they are talking about? Does the author have too much bias towards the subject? Also evaluating timeliness of your source is a good way to know if the information is recent. If you are writing a paper that involves recent issues you want to watch out for things that were published years ago because that information may not still hold true. Lastly is evaluating the genre of your source. By doing this you can get a better idea of the type of audience that was intended and the type of arguments that could be made throughout the source. Such as if it is a blog post, it is most likely going to be the authors personal opinions and observations.By doing all these evaluations you will have a better knowledge of your source and the type of information it is going to contain therefore helping you decide whether or not it is going to be useful to you when writing your paper.

Most sources can be evaluated using those different approaches. The two sets of sources that you might have challenge with evaluating using the above guidelines are digital and field sources. With digital sources the websites might not contain all the information that you are looking for. However you can usually find links to a different site that will tell you more about the author, or FAQ's. For field sources some questions that you can ask would be are the questions in an interview, a survey, or correspondence still relevant to your research project? Is the information you collected in an observation still relevant? And are the individuals you interviewed or corresponded with as qualified and knowledgeable as you expected?