Quaratiello_CH2.docx

Evaluating Informational Sources WHEN YOU NEED A NEW PAIR OF SNEAKERS, YOU DON’T JUST start pulling pairs off the store shelves without regard to their size, color, or style and then go to the cashier to check out; this would be absurd because the shoes would probably need to be returned for anothe...

Evaluating Informational Sources WHEN YOU NEED A NEW PAIR OF SNEAKERS, YOU DON’T JUST start pulling pairs off the store shelves without regard to their size, color, or style and then go to the cashier to check out; this would be absurd because the shoes would probably need to be returned for another size as well as a different color or style. You try shoes on to make sure they fit. Even if you buy your sneakers online, you don’t just buy the first pair that pops up on the screen. You browse and maybe read some of the reviews left by other customers. In other words, there is some degree of evaluation that happens when you buy something. Similarly, you shouldn’t just use the websites that appear on the first page of your search engine results or the first articles that appear when you search a library periodical database. Just like an item you will spend your hard-earned money on, an informational source needs to be carefully considered. Better chosen sources will result in better research papers and consequently better grades! The points of evaluation certainly differ between sneakers and informational sources, but the general process is similar. Doing research is not about finding the most readily available information on your topic, just as buying a pair of sneakers is not about randomly grabbing the first pair that you see. It’s about finding quality information that meets your needs. An important research skill, therefore, is the ability to evaluate any type of informational source to determine whether it satisfies your needs and will be appropriate for your particular research assignment. After reading this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions: When you retrieve numerous articles about your topic through a periodical database, how do you know which ones are worth the time it will take to read them? When you search the online catalog for books, how do you pick which books you will actually pull from the shelves or which e-books you will read online? After an initial internet search of your topic, how do you decide which particular links to click in the long list of choices that appears? With the constantly increasing amount of information available online and the powerful electronic tools we now have for accessing it all, you may actually discover, to your surprise and dismay, that you’re overwhelmed with too many sources. Don’t select a source simply for the sake of adding one more item to your bibliography. As with so many things in life, quality is more important than quantity when it comes to information. The search strategies explained in this book certainly enable you to find sources related to your topic, but evaluation better enables you to further narrow your search and select the most relevant items from the many that you find. Although assignments vary and more will be expected of you as you advance your education, you may need only a half dozen—or maybe even fewer—sources for your initial research papers. How do you find the best sources that will help you write a great essay? This chapter answers that question. Although evaluating the information you find in books and periodicals has always been important, evaluating websites freely available on the internet is absolutely crucial. Because anyone can publish on the internet, many sites may appear legitimate but lack depth, authority, and accuracy. Although a great deal of interesting material is available on the internet, and it can be a good source of quick information, always be skeptical. Librarians certainly evaluate material—both online and in print—before purchasing anything for their libraries. They want to be sure that their choices are reliable and credible and have been edited by reputable publishers. But they evaluate these materials with a broad audience in mind, not for your specific research topic. Even though library sources don’t require the scrutiny that free websites do, you still need to apply the principles of evaluation that are discussed in this chapter to all information. Evaluating information involves asking a series of questions like those basic journalistic questions that you might already be familiar with: Who? What? When? Why? and How? You may notice that Where? is missing from my list. The reason that I have omitted this question is because I consider this evaluation criterion irrelevant in terms of research. It doesn’t matter where you found a source, whether you found your information on a website, in a print book, or through an online periodical database. These are merely the formats that information comes in. Although the format shouldn’t matter, many students still consider this the most important criterion for selecting sources. They prefer websites they can access from their dorm rooms instead of books that require a trip to the library. They choose only the articles that are available through a quick internet search and never use the superior periodical databases available on their library’s website. The most useful sources for your research, however, may not be the material that is the easiest to obtain. Here are the other basic journalistic questions applied to informational sources: What ideas or information does the source provide? Considering the content of a source is perhaps the most fundamental question. Does it answer your research questions? Who wrote it? This question focuses on authority. When was it written? The date that the source was published is a sig- nificant consideration for some topics. Why was it written? This question considers the purpose of a resource. How is it written? Evaluating the accuracy, style, and perspective of the author is crucial. Evaluating Content WHAT INFORMATION DOES THE SOURCE PROVIDE? Perhaps the most fundamental question to ask when evaluating a source is whether it adequately provides the information you need. You must determine if a source addresses your topic enough. Does it answer the main questions that you have? The records you find using online catalogs and periodical databases and the results you get from search engines do not always have enough information to evaluate the material described. Even when you are given an abstract in an article citation or a table of contents in an online book record, you may not get a clear idea of what the source will really provide. An effective way to evaluate content is to skim through the actual book, article, or website to see how extensively your topic is addressed. If you are using an online source, you can utilize the Find feature to search for the prevalence of certain keywords. Using Chrome on a PC, for example, simply click Ctrl+F—or Command+F on Apple devices—and a search box will appear in the upper right corner of the screen. Some web pages can be very long. Search for a particular term to see how many times your topic is actually addressed. Although the site may have been located by a search engine, your search term might be mentioned only once toward the end of the page so the source will probably not be that useful. Books have always had tables of contents and indexes to aid you in this process, and their electronic counterparts do also. Many websites also have site indexes that direct you to the pertinent web pages within the site. A specific thing to look out for when evaluating periodical articles is their length. Periodical databases usually mention the length of an article in the search results. As a general rule, articles that are a page or less will not be worth the effort of retrieving. Evaluating Authority WHO WROTE THE SOURCE? When writers are considered authorities on certain subjects, this suggests that they have some expertise or special knowledge that most other people do not have. An author with some credentials or extensive experience can add reliability to a source. Although you can’t always find out much about an author, books often contain brief biographies, and journal articles may include footnotes regarding the author; websites often provide links to information about the author. If not, you can also look up an author using a search engine to find basic biographical information on the internet. Questions to ask to determine the authority of an informational source include What has the author accomplished careerwise? What else has the author written? What pertinent experiences has the author had? Which organizations is the author affiliated with? What academic degrees has the author earned? Authority is easier to establish for authors of journal articles than for mag- azine articles because most articles in scholarly periodicals are written by experts in the journal’s specialty field. Journal contributors are often selected by their peers as having written articles that are important and worthy of publication, helping to advance the study of the field. This process is called peer review, and it can enhance the authority of an informational source. When evaluating the authority of websites, however, keep in mind that any- body can publish one, so many sites have no editorial control. It is important to know who is behind the information that you see on a web page. This can sometimes be more difficult than with books and periodical articles because the author is not always identified on a website. If this is the case, try to at least identify the organization responsible for designing or maintaining the site whether it is a company, a nonprofit organization, an educational insti- tution, a government agency, or some other legitimate group. Often, such an organization is credited at the bottom of the web page, but if you are having difficulty finding out who is responsible for a website, look for an About link on the home page. If you can’t find any reference to an author or sponsoring organization, the website should probably be considered unreliable. You should always be a little suspicious of websites and be prepared to do a bit of detective work. Any current site I mention may be gone by the time this book is published, so let me tell you the story of martinlutherking.org, a site that has already disappeared from the internet. It used to come up on the first page of links resulting from a Google search for “Martin Luther King” and seemed like a fine source for biographical information based on the brief info appearing under the link. After someone accessed this site, however, it became clear that whoever was responsible for the material did not think highly of Dr. King. The identity of an individual author remained a mystery, but a clue was provided by a link at the bottom of the page: “Hosted by Stormfront.” Clicking on this link would bring up the home page of Stormfront, a notorious white supremacist organization, thus explaining the derogatory misinformation on martinlutherking.org, a website that would be inappropriate for an essay about MLK. Evaluating authority is only one step in the evaluation process. A source should not be selected based on just who its author is; this aspect of evaluation relies greatly on the subjective analysis of expertise. Just because someone has an advanced degree and is referred to as an expert, you should remain skeptical of a source authored by such an apparent authority if it is deficient in other aspects of evaluation. Similarly, you wouldn’t just pick up the first pair of sneakers at a shoe store manufactured by a particular company without also choosing the right color, size, and style! Evaluating Dates WHEN WAS THE SOURCE WRITTEN? If you were researching the initial reactions to the terrorist attacks of Sep- tember 11, an eyewitness account might be very useful. Therefore, you could search for newspaper articles written for a few days following these attacks. Certainly, many authors have written and will continue to write about this day, especially on significant dates, most recently the twentieth anniversary, but a source written around the time of the attack will have a more raw and immediate quality rather than a retrospective point of view. Conversely, if you were writing about how social networking sites are changing society, you would probably want the most up-to-date information about this topic rather than articles from early in the twenty-first century about Myspace and Friendster, dominant social media platforms before the emergence of Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes it’s important to have the most recent information available, especially for scientific and business-related topics. At other times, particularly with historical topics or those related to the humanities or literature, you may prefer older sources in order to obtain primary information. In either case, as you search for material on your subject, you should determine the date that each item was written in order to evaluate the item thoroughly. It’s easy enough to determine the date that a book was written because the copyright date will be shown on one of the first few left-hand pages; it will also be listed in the online catalog record. The dates for articles are included in the citations you find through periodical databases. Many online databases allow the user to limit by a specific date range or to display results in chrono- logical order, either from newest to oldest or oldest to newest. Finding out how old a web page is, however, can be problematic because websites are constantly being updated. Often, dates were not provided in the first place when the site was originally posted. Even if a date does appear on a web page, however, you often have no way of knowing if it is the date of initial creation or the date of a more recent revision. Most internet search engines allow you to limit results to web pages updated within certain time frames: the past twenty-four hours, the past week, the past month, and so on. So even if a date is not listed, you can have some idea of how old the information is. It is important to understand what is called the information cycle when temporally evaluating your source. This cycle describes how information evolves as it is conveyed through various media. Consider, for example, an infamous event that occurred on April 15, 2013—the Boston Marathon Bombing. Perhaps you recall where you were when you first heard the news. But do you remember how you got this news? Was it posted on social media or an online news site, or was it broadcast on TV or radio? You might have been at school and been told about what happened by a teacher or school administrator. But where did they hear it? Because breaking news requires a medium that allows for immediate dissemination, TV, radio, and the internet are where we first hear about an event. When the story of the Boston Marathon Bombing first broke, there was a lot of confusion and uncertainty. TV news reporters struggled to cover the aftermath as facts remained murky and questions abounded. How many people were killed or injured? Would more bombs go off after the initial attack? What sort of bombs were used? Who set them off? Why? Newspaper articles began to appear next, some within hours on the internet like one from the New York Times with the factual headline “Blasts at Boston Marathon Kill 3 and Injure 100” (unfortunately the number of injured would rise); newspa- per articles continued to appear the next morning online and in print while just about every TV and radio station was dominated by news of the attack. As the week progressed, many questions were answered as details emerged about the identity of the bombers and their unfortunate victims. The week culminated in the dramatic capture of the younger bomber after a massive manhunt. All of this was reported constantly on TV and radio, the internet, and newspapers. Toward the end of the week, magazines appeared with cover stories about the Boston Marathon Bombing, and most of their issues related to this tragic event. These articles were able to go into more depth than the initial reports were able to; they provided perspective and focused on specific topics like the traumatic effects of this event on children, profiles of the victims, and analysis of the bombers’ motives. Within months, another medium joined the discussion: academic journals. For example, in December 2013, the Journal of Traumatic Stress published “Psychological Effects of the Marathon Bombing on Boston-Area Veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” As the title suggests, this article could not have been written in a day or a week because it certainly required in-depth study of a very specific aspect of the topic. The medium that takes the longest time to appear is the book. Although an e-book might be available before its print equivalent, it still takes a long time to write an entire book. Many books were written about the Boston Marathon Bombing; one example is Scott Helman’s Long Mile Home: Boston under Attack, the City’s Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice, which was published in 2014. As this title reflects, books provide a depth and breadth of coverage unequaled by most other sources unless you find a long journal article on your specific topic. The perspective of each type of source is different due to the amount of time that has passed between the event and its analysis. The information cycle, however, is not a completely linear process; newspaper articles still appear after books are written, while TV documentaries may provide retrospective coverage of an event such as the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The information cycle highlights some of the differences among the types of sources you will find when you do research. Evaluating Purpose WHY WAS THE SOURCE WRITTEN? Think about the numerous reasons that people have for writing. Unless you’re writing a private journal or diary, you are writing for an audience and want to communicate with that audience. Some of the primary purposes of communi- cation are to inform, instruct, or educate the reader. An encyclopedia article, for example, is written primarily to convey factual information. A newspaper article, unless it is clearly identified as an editorial or opinion piece, should do the same thing. How-to manuals are written to instruct the reader on a particular task. Textbooks educate students. These types of informational sources should all be objective and as free of any bias as possible. There are other reasons to write, however, and not all sources are purely informational. For example, some authors may primarily want to entertain their audience. This purpose is clearly fulfilled by those best-selling novels that are characterized as beach reading. Other authors want to inspire their readers with their stories, both true and fictional. Another major reason to write is to persuade readers, and if this seems to be the purpose of a partic- ular source, be very careful to notice any bias, whether intentional or not, or opinion that might compromise the factual nature of the information provided. Bias might be subtly reflected in the words chosen by a writer. Although a journalist should remain objective, this goal is often violated as indicated by sensational headlines that include misleading terms. Consider, for example, the following headline from a 2015 edition of Discover Magazine’s online newsletter: “Global Temperatures Skyrocketed in October.” The article goes on to summarize the Japan Meteorological Agency’s report that average global temperatures had increased less than one degree Celsius from 1890 to 2015. An accompanying graph shows that this rise was characterized by many ups and downs throughout these 125 years, including some increases over a century ago that were larger than those during the twenty-first century. Regardless of your views on climate change, the use of the word skyrocketed in this title is misleading and implies that climate change is an immediate threat when it is not. Be aware that newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets have always used such sensational titles because they make readers want to read the articles. The rise of the internet has led to the use of a more specific term for such titles: clickbait. Informational sources can provide very different perspectives on the same subject; sometimes these differences reflect an underlying bias. Consider this example: in 2019 Time Magazine named teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg its Person of the Year, and the cover story in this year-end issue reflected positively on her pursuits. During the same year, the New Republic published an article titled “Don’t Listen to Greta Thunberg.” If the New Republic had its own “person of the year” issue, it certainly would have not chosen Thunberg. Although one magazine’s purpose was to have its readers share its appreciation of Thunberg, another wanted exactly the opposite response. It is important to notice such a difference of opinion in comparing two such articles. You would not use the information in these sources in the same way that you would use information from an unbiased source such as an encyclopedia because such sources can manipulate or overlook facts in fulfilling their purpose. It is extremely difficult to find an objective source of news online. That doesn’t mean that you should avoid biased sources, but it does mean that those sources that provide a more balanced point of view may provide better information for your essay. To become more familiar with the political bias inherent in major media outlets, take a look at the AllSides Media Bias Chart (allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart). This source identifies, among many other outlets, MSNBC and the Atlantic as being liberal by placing them furthest left on the chart while Fox News and the National Review are iden- tified as conservative by being placed furthest right. Authors who write opinionated articles do so because they want to con- vince their readers to agree with them. They do this by using the three basic methods of persuasion that have been recognized since the ancient Greeks referred to them as pathos, ethos, and logos. Pathos (emotional appeal): Appealing to readers’ emotions is very effective. An article supporting gun control, for example, may appeal to emo- tion by starting with an anecdote about a deadly school shooting. An article supporting gun rights might open with an emotionally appeal- ing anecdote about an averted mass shooting at a grocery store that was stopped by a customer legally carrying a concealed weapon. In both cases, real situations are highlighted and no misinformation is given, but there is a definite difference in perspective. A source that uses some specific anecdotes may rouse your sympathy to generate interest, but if a writer seems to be only taking advantage of your emotions, this source may not be the best choice. Ethos (ethical appeal): Authors often utilize experts and well-known figures that the readers can respect or trust to add credibility to a source. Newspaper articles include interviews of eyewitnesses. Journal articles cite the research of other scholars. Citing experts is fine and quite appropriate, especially in scholarly sources, but if an author seems to be using questionable authority figures or vaguely referring to “experts,” be wary of the source’s content. If you have already evaluated authority effectively, you will not be swayed by manipulative ethical appeal. Logos (logical appeal): Sources that present the most logical facts are usually the most valuable sources for you to use in your research. It is hard to refute the proof provided by factual information. Data, which is factual information in numerical form, is especially effective. It provides the raw material from which statistics are compiled. While statistical information can be very persuasive, you must evaluate its logic carefully because it provides an interpretation of the data it uses, and this data can be manipulated or taken out of context to support either side of an issue. Evaluating Quality HOW IS IT WRITTEN? When choosing your sources, you must evaluate their level of complexity. Some sources are written for specialists in certain fields, and the technical jargon will sound like another language to you. For example, a recent arti- cle appeared in the National Science Review titled “Extraterrestrial Artificial Photosynthetic Materials for In-situ Resource Utilization.” Judging from the title, this article does not sound like it was written for the average college undergrad, so if you’re researching the possibility of a manned mission to Mars in the near future, you will probably not want to use this highly technical source that is obviously written for professional scientists. Consider your own level of knowledge when selecting sources. If you try to use something that is beyond your comprehension, you will be frustrated. Conversely, if you use sources that are obviously written for a juvenile or high school audience, your paper will not reflect the depth of research expected of a college student. Other questions to ask when evaluating the quality of sources concern the methods used by the authors to collect their own information. Did they interview people? Did they write about their own experiences or observations of people, things, and events? Did they conduct their own statistical studies or perhaps even conduct experiments? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you have found what are known as primary sources. Such sources provide firsthand information, which can sometimes be superior to the information provided by secondary sources. Secondary sources are those in which the authors, who are more removed from what they are writing about, use and interpret primary sources. Authors who do not write about their own firsthand experiences or observations provide secondary sources of information. Articles or books that comment on events that were not observed by their authors are secondary. An article about circus animal abuse, for example, written by an animal rights advocate who has not actually observed a circus or interviewed a trainer is a second- ary source. This type of source is fine to use as long as the information is accurate and based on other legitimate sources. The primary sources used by the author should also be clearly identified. Journal articles and books should include documentation identifying all of the sources used; this usually takes the form of a bibliography. A third type of source is referred to as tertiary. These sources include such reference material as almanacs, encyclopedias, and bibliographies, all of which are described in detail in chapter 7. Tertiary sources distill the information contained in many other primary and secondary sources and are useful for learning basic background information on your topic. Another qualitative issue to consider is accuracy and whether the informa- tion provided by the source is correct. Accuracy is related to content and is most applicable to evaluating websites. A book or article should have gone through an editorial process that included fact-checking. On the other hand, most websites are often unedited, and, as a result, they are much more likely to contain wrong information. After reading a number of articles and books on your topic and gaining some basic knowledge, you may have learned enough to notice inaccuracies in some of your other sources. If a website about the Civil War gives the wrong date for the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, it would be difficult to trust the accuracy of the data it provides on the number of casualties. When you detect inaccuracies in a source, you should simply pass it by and use something more reliable. You should even be cautious if you notice minor errors like misspellings because they reflect poorly on the source as a whole. The time and effort you spend evaluating sources are well worth it. Think of how much time you spent picking out your last pair of sneakers. If you had bought the first one you saw on display, you might be very sorry later on when you realized that the sneakers made your feet hurt. Just like picking the right pair of sneakers, choosing your informational sources requires adequate critical evaluation.