List at Least Six Ways You Can Evaluate a Source as You Are Reading.

Chapter 5: Evaluating Sources

Learning Objectives

At the conclusion of this affiliate, y'all will be able to:

• Critically evaluate the sources of the information you accept found.
• Evaluate the content of selected fabric for your purposes.

Searching for information is often nonlinear and iterative, requiring the evaluation of a range of information sources and the mental flexibility to pursue alternate avenues equally new agreement develops. (Association of College & Inquiry Libraries, 2016).

You adult a viable inquiry question, compiled a list of subject headings and keywords and spent a groovy bargain of time searching the literature of your discipline or topic for sources. It's at present fourth dimension to evaluate all of the information you found. Not only do you want to be sure of the source and the quality of the information, but yous likewise desire to decide whether each item is appropriate fit for your own review. This is also the point at which you make sure that you have searched out publications for all areas of your research question and go back into the literature for another search, if necessary.

In general, when we hash out evaluation of sources we are talking about looking at quality, accuracy, relevance, bias, reputation, currency, and brownie factors in a specific piece of work, whether it'south a book, ebook, article, website, or blog posting. Before y'all include a source in your literature review, you lot should conspicuously sympathise what it is and why yous are including it. According to Bennard et al., (2014), "Using inaccurate, irrelevant, or poorly researched sources can affect the quality of your ain work." (para. four).

When evaluating a work for inclusion in, or exclusion from, your literature review, ask yourself a series of questions about each source.

five.1.1 Evaluating books

For master and secondary sources you located in your search, employ the ASAP mnemonic to evaluate inclusion in your literature review:

5.one.i.ane Age

Is information technology outdated? The answer to this question depends on your topic. If you are comparing historical classroom direction techniques, something from 1965 might be appropriate. In Nursing, unless you are doing a historical comparing, a textbook from 5 years ago might be as well dated for your needs.

A General Rule of Thumb:

v years, maximum: medicine, wellness, didactics, technology, science
10-20 years: history, literature, art

5.i.i.ii Sources

Check reference or bibliography sources as well equally those listed in footnotes or endnotes. Skim the list to see what kinds of sources the author used. When were the sources published? If the author is primarily citing works from x or 15 years agone, the book may not be what y'all need.

five.1.i.3 Author

Does the author accept the credentials to write on the topic? Does the author have an academic degree or inquiry grant funding? What else has the writer published on the topic?

5.1.1.4 Publisher

Expect for bookish presses, including university presses. Books published under popular press imprints (such equally Random House or Macmillan, in the U.South.) will not present scholarly inquiry in the aforementioned way equally Sage, Oxford, Harvard, or the University of Washington Press.

Other questions to ask about the volume you may want to include in your literature review:

• What is the book's purpose? Why was it written? Who is the intended audition?
• What is the conclusion or argument? How well is the main statement or conclusion supported?
• Is information technology relevant to your research? How is it related to your research question?
• Do yous see whatever show of bias or unsubstantiated information?

five.1.two Evaluating websites

In your enquiry, it is likely you lot will discover information on the spider web that you lot will want to include in your literature review. For instance, if your review is related to the electric current policy issues in public education in the United States, a potentially relevant data source may be a document located on the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) website titled The Condition of Education 2017. As well, for nursing, an commodity titled Discussing Vaccination with Concerned Patients: An Evidence-Based Resource for Healthcare Providers is available through the nursingcenter.com website. How do yous evaluate these resource, and others like them?

Use the RADAR mnemonic (Mandalios, 2013) to evaluate net sources:

v.ane.2.1 Relevance

How did you find the website and how is it relevant to your topic?

• Was it recommended by a reliable source?
• Was it cited in a scholarly source, such as a peer-reviewed journal?
• Was it linked from a reputable site?

5.i.ii.2 Authorization

Look for the About folio to notice data about the purpose of the website . You lot may make a determination of its brownie based on what you find at that place. Does the page exhibit a particular point of view or bias? For example, a middle association or charter school may be promoting a particular perspective – how might that impact the objectivity of the information located on their site? Is at that place advertising or is at that place a product information attached to the content?

five.1.2.3 Date

• When was the page created?
• Is it kept up to date?
• Are the links current and functional?

5.1.2.4 Advent

• Does the data presented announced to exist factual?
• Is the language formal or bookish?
• How does information technology compare to other information yous accept read on the topic?
• Are references or links to cited material included?

five.i.2.5 Reason

What is the spider web address or URL? This can requite y'all a clue almost the purpose of the website, which may exist to debate, abet, annunciate or sell, campaign, or present data. Here are some common domains and their origins:

• .org – An advancement website for an organisation
• .com – A private or commercial site
• .net – A network system or Cyberspace provider/no longer frequently used
• .edu – The site of a college educational establishment
• .gov – A federal government site
• .wa.united states – A country regime site which may include public schools and community colleges
• .uk, .ca, .jm – A country site

Mike Caulfield (2017), the author of Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, recommends a few simple strategies to evaluate a website (also as social media):

• Bank check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already provided a synthesis of the research described.
• Go upstream to the source: Get "upstream" to the source of the claim. Most spider web content is not original. Get to the original source to empathise the brownie and reliability of the information.
• Read laterally: Read laterally. Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, writer, etc.). The truth is in the network.

five.1.3 Evaluating periodical articles

It is likely that most of the resources you locate for your review volition be from the scholarly literature of your discipline or in your topic expanse. As we take already seen, peer-reviewed articles are written past and for experts in a field. They mostly describe formal research studies or experiments with the purpose of providing insight on a topic. You may have located these manufactures through Google, Google Scholar, a subscription or open up access database, or citation searching. You at present may desire to know how to evaluate the usefulness for your research. Every bit with the other resources, you are again looking for authorization, accurateness, reliability, relevance, currency, and scope. Looking at each commodity as a separate and unique artifact, consider these elements in your evaluation:

5.1.3.1 Credibility/Authority

Enquire: Who is the author? Is this person considered an expert in their field?

• Search the author's name in a general web search engine like Google.
• What are the researcher's academic credentials?
• What else has this writer written? Search by author in the databases and see how much they accept published on any given bailiwick.
• How often or frequently has this article been cited past other scholars?

Commendation analysis is the study of the impact and assumed quality of an article, an author, or an institution, based on the number of times works and/or authors accept been cited by others. Google Scholar is a good way to get at this information.

Figure five.1 Google Scholar

five.i.3.2 Accuracy

Check the facts. Inquire:

• Can statistics be verified through other sources?
• Does this information seem to fit with what you lot have read in other sources?

5.1.3.iii Reliability/Objectivity

Inquire: Is in that location an obvious bias? That doesn't mean that you can't utilise the information, information technology just means you need to have the bias into account.

• Is a particular point of view or bias immediately obvious, or does it seem objective at first glance?
• What signal of view does the author represent? Are they articulate about their point of view?
• Is the article an editorial that is trying to contend a position?
• Is the article in a publication with a detail editorial position?

five.1.three.four Relevance

Ask: The hard questions:

• Is the information relevant to your topic/thesis?
• How does the article fit into the scope of the literature on this topic?
• Who is the intended audition for this source?
  • Is the material too technical or too clinical?
  • Is information technology too elementary or basic?
• Does the information back up your thesis or help yous answer your question, or is it a challenge to make some kind of connection?
• Does the data present an contrary point of view so y'all tin can show that you have addressed all sides of the argument in your newspaper?

v.ane.3.5 Currency

Ask:

• When was the source published?
• How important is current information to your topic, discipline, or paper blazon?
• Does older material add together to the history of the research? Or practice yous demand something more than current to back up your thesis?

5.one.iii.6 Scope and Purpose

To determine and evaluate in this category, Ask:

• Is it a general work that provides an overview of the topic or is it specifically focused on only ane aspect of your topic?
• Does the latitude of the work match your expectations?
• Is the article meant to inform, explicate, persuade or sell something. Be enlightened of the purpose as you lot read the content and accept that into consideration when deciding whether to apply it or not.

For Nursing and other medical manufactures Ask:

• What are the research methods used in the commodity?
• Where does the method fall in the evidence pyramid? Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are the near credible, with manufactures that are opinions the least credible.

Figure 5.2 Evidence Pyramid

• Meta Analysis: A systematic review that uses quantitative methods to summarize the results.
• Systematic Review: An article in which the authors have systematically searched for, appraised, and summarized all of the medical literature on a specific topic.
• Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs): RCTs include a randomized group of patients in an experimental group, too equally a command group. These groups are monitored for the variables/outcomes of interest.
• Accomplice Study: Enquiry identifies two groups (cohorts) of patients, one which did receive the exposure of interest, and i which did not, and follows these cohorts for a specified duration of fourth dimension, in club to measure the outcome of involvement.
• Case Report: Involves identifying patients who have the effect of interest (cases) and control patients without the same outcome, and looks to come across if they had the exposure of involvement.
• Animal Enquiry / Lab Studies: Information creation begins at the lesser of the pyramid: This is where ideas and laboratory research take place. Ideas turn into therapies and diagnostic tools, which are then tested with lab models and animals.
• Groundwork Information / Expert Opinion: Handbooks, encyclopedias, and textbooks often provide a good foundation or introduction and often include generalized information near a condition. While groundwork information presents a convenient summary, it typically takes about 3 years for this blazon of literature to be published.

5.1.4 Evaluating Social Media

Although social media (for instance, Twitter or Facebook) is generally treated as an object under report rather than a source of information on a topic, the prevalence of social media equally advice and sharing platforms must be best-selling. Information technology's important to be skeptical of these sources, specially for inclusion in a literature review. However, equally with any other spider web resources,you can evaluate a social media posting for authenticity past asking the post-obit questions:

• Location of the source – Is the author in the place they are tweeting or posting about?
• Network – Who is in the author'southward network and who follows the account?
• Content – Tin can the information be corroborated from other sources?
• Contextual updates – Does the writer usually post or tweet on this topic? If so, what did past or updated posts say? Exercise they fill in more details?
• Reliability – does the author cite sources and are those sources reliable? (Sheridan Libraries, 2017)

Another way to think most evaluation of sources is to ask the 5W questions:

• What blazon of document is it?
• Who created it?
• Why was the material published?
• When was information technology published?
• Where was the resources published?
• How was the information gathered and presented? (Radom, 2017)

Locating sources for your literature review by using discovery layers, library catalogs, databases, search engines, and other search platforms may accept a great deal of time and effort. Does everything you found and retrieved have value or worth to y'all as you write your ain literature review? If the resource has not met the criteria higher up and you can't justify its place in your literature review, it doesn't deserve to exist mentioned in your work. Include high-quality materials that are current, accurate, credible, and most importantly relevant to your enquiry question, hypothesis, or topic.

Practice

Evaluate a Website

Watch this brusque video:

Using a search engine like Google, do a quick search for a topic that interests you lot. Select a website from your listing of results and evaluate it using the elements of website evaluation listed before in this chapter.

• How did you discover the website?
• What is the domain name (the URL) of the site?
• What can yous learn virtually the author/s of the site?
• When was the site last updated?
• Is information technology authentic based on what you know about the topic?
• Are there references?
• Do y'all notice any bias?
• Is the site functional? (re links working? Or practice they lead to non-functional pages?)

Evaluate a Book

Select a subject specific book or ebook that you can access speedily and evaluate information technology based on the ASAP criteria.

• Writer
• Sources
• Age
• Publisher

Evaluate an Article

You can practice evaluation using the fastened articles. You don't need to spend a lot of time with the commodity, merely see if you tin identify each of the elements of evaluation. Remember the elements of evaluation for articles are:

• Authority/Credibility or Study Design for Nursing
• Accurateness
• Reliability/Objectivity
• Relevance
• Currency
• Telescopic and Purpose

For Teaching: Quality standards in e-learning: A matrix of analysis (Frydenberg, 2002).

For Nursing: Beliefs and attitudes towards participating in genetic research (Kerath et al, 2013).

Examination Yourself

Check the Reply Fundamental

For Nursing students: Your topic is the relationship betwixt autism and vaccinations. Which of the two resource would you lot include in your literature review? Why?

1. Hviid, Anders, Michael Stellfield, Jan Wohlfart, and Mads Melbye. "Association Between Thimerosal-Containing Vaccine and Autism." Journal of the American Medical Association 290, no. thirteen (Oct 1, 2003): 1763–1766. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/commodity.aspx?articleid=197365
2. Chepkemoi Maina, Lillian, Simon Karanja, and Janeth Kombich. "Immunization Coverage and Its Determinants amid Children Aged 12–23 Months in a Peri-Urban Area of Kenya." Pan-African Medical Journal fourteen, no.iii (February 1, 2013). http://www.panafrican-med-periodical.com/content/article/14/iii/full/

For Educational activity students: Your topic is music therapy in kindergarten classrooms in the Us. Which of the two resources would you include in your literature review? Why?"

1. Simpson, Kate, and Deb Nifty. "Music Interventions for Children with Autism: Review of the Literature." Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 41, no. 11 (November 2011): 1507-1514.
2. Bowman, Robert. "Approaches for Counseling Children Through Music." Elementary School Guidance and Counseling 21, no. four (Apr 1987): 284-91.

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Source: https://press.rebus.community/literaturereviewsedunursing/chapter/chapter-5-documenting-sources/

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