Evaluating Sources | Approaches & Examples
Identifying good sources will improve the quality of your research. Systematically evaluating the sources you’re thinking about using will help you to:
- Select relevant and credible sources
- Determine the quality of the arguments they present
When evaluating sources, it’s important to keep your research question clearly in mind and practice critical thinking.
Evaluating the credibility of a source
When determining the value of a particular source, it is important to assess how trustworthy and reliable it is. We can approach this systematically by employing the CRAAP test and a lateral reading strategy.
CRAAP test
The CRAAP test is a useful method for evaluating the credibility of a source. CRAAP stands for:
- Currency: Is it up-to-date enough for your purposes?
- Relevance: How relevant is it to your topic?
- Authority: Is it written by experts in the field?
- Accuracy: Does it contain supporting evidence? Can any of the information be verified?
- Purpose: Why does it exist? (e.g., Is it trying to sell something or promote a particular ideology?)
How you apply these criteria will be determined by your subject and focus. You need to understand the types of sources and how they should be used in your area of research.
Lateral reading
Lateral reading means evaluating the credibility of a source by finding out how other reputable sources view that source and any claims that it is making.
Instead of concentrating on the source itself (reading vertically), you extend your evaluation by looking at other sources that mention it (reading laterally).
This enables you to:
- Check information
- Consider the information in a wider context
- Identify possible weaknesses
If you discover that a source is employing methods or reaching conclusions that are inconsistent with other sources you trust, you may decide that it is lacking in credibility.
Your lateral reading includes searching for the author and references to the article in other sources, as well as the primary sources the article used.
This enables you to read what others have said about the author and the article, and it helps you to check if it is accurately representing the information or cherry-picking in support of its arguments.
Evaluating the relevance of a source
We evaluate sources in different ways according to where we are in the research process and the nature of our research topic. It is useful to break down source evaluation into two steps:
- A preliminary evaluation
- An in-depth evaluation (if we decide the source is worth further examination)
Preliminary evaluation
Carrying out a preliminary evaluation of a source will help you to decide if it is likely to be relevant before studying it in detail. This can save you a lot of time, particularly if you’re dealing with a large number of sources as part of a literature review or systematic review.
Preliminary evaluation involves examining information that is not contained in the main text:
- Find the table of contents to assess the breadth of topics it covers.
- Look through the index to see if it contains important terms and names of relevant scholars.
Read abstracts, prefaces, introductions, and conclusions to build up a picture of the aims and parameters of the research and the kind of conclusions it reaches.
Including a preliminary evaluation stage will help you to:
- Decide if you should move on to an in-depth evaluation of the source
- Allow you to evaluate a greater number of sources in the same amount of time
- Concentrate your efforts on relevant, quality information
The results will be based on the titles of the articles or how many times the keyword is used in the text.
However, you still need to examine the source itself before deciding if it is relevant to your research.
In-depth source evaluation
Once you have identified a list of sources that are likely to be relevant to your research and credible, you can begin to examine them in detail. Start by picking out any landmark studies and the sources that you think are going to be the most relevant.
Can you establish any connections between the sources as you’re reading? Try to identify:
- Important areas of debate: Are there any particular questions or topics that are attracting a lot of focus? How does the source contribute to these debates?
- Key publications and researchers: Do certain texts and scholars keep coming up across multiple sources? How does the source respond to them?
- Trends: Are researchers focusing on any particular research methods or theories? How does the source view these trends?
- Gaps: Are there any areas where research or discussion is lacking? Are there any issues with the quality of the research in specific areas?
Don’t disregard sources because you don’t agree with their conclusions. They may well be relevant and can offer different perspectives that bolster your arguments.
Evaluating arguments in a source
A good source will support its positions and conclusions with evidence. Sources will often use a combination of primary and secondary sources to construct an argument, and you need to think about how the author is using these sources.
How good is the analysis and critique of the sources? Is there a logical relationship between the conclusions and the evidence?
When evaluating the quality of a source’s arguments, ask yourself:
- To what extent does the evidence support any claims that are made?
- How is the author using the evidence? What methods, models and theories are they applying?
- Could the evidence be interpreted differently, leading to alternative conclusions?
- How do the arguments compare with arguments in your other potential sources? Is the author agreeing or disagreeing with them? Is the source questioning a consensus view?
Considering a source’s arguments and conclusions in relation to other sources (lateral reading) will help you to decide if it is reliable, and what you want to say about it in your research.
Frequently asked questions about evaluating sources
- How can I decide if a source is relevant to my research?
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When evaluating sources, do a preliminary evaluation of each source before you invest time in an in-depth evaluation:
- Find the table of contents to assess the scope of the work
- Scan the abstract, preface, introduction, and conclusion
- Look through the index for important terms and names of relevant scholars.
- What is vertical reading?
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When evaluating sources, vertical reading means reading a source (e.g., a website) to evaluate its credibility.
This is contrasted with lateral reading, which means researching what has been written about the source elsewhere in order to help you evaluate its credibility (e.g., searching for references to a website on other websites that you trust).
