Evaluate all information, whether from a book, article, or website.
These guidelines were derived from General Guidelines, Online Writing Lab (OWL), Purdue University.
MLA also provides a checklist for evaluating sources.
Magazines are written for the general public. They often have a lot of advertisements in them.
Journals, on the other hand, are targeted to students or professionals working in a particular field. The usually have very few ads in them. The articles usually include bibliographies at at the end and the author's or authors' credentials (where they went to college and where they work) are given.
Sometimes a publication is peer-reviewed which means that all of the articles have been read and approved for publication by experts in the field.
Peer reviewed materials are excellent sources of information for scholarly papers!
Peer reviewed = Articles read & approved for publication by experts in the field
Experts = People with advanced degrees in the subject or who have worked in the field for many years
Searching for information about the author or organization responsible for the website, article, or book is an excellent way of evaluating sources. This method is called lateral reading.
The Civic Online Reasoning Institute at Stanford University has an excellent explanation of Lateral Reading in "Sort Fact from Fiction Online with Lateral Reading." The video is under four minutes. The University of Louisville Libraries also has this useful handout about lateral reading.
