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Universiteitsbibliotheek – LibGuides

Introduction to the study of history: Evaluation

Step four

Evaluating your search results is so important that we want to give it some extra attention here. Because it's generally not so hard to find some literature for your research. But you don't just want any literature, you want the best possible literature for your research.

How to evaluate the relevance of sources

To determine if a piece is relevant, you may try to answer the following questions:

  1. Does the source help you to answer your main questions and sub-questions?
  2. Does the source answer your whole question/sub-question or only one aspect?
  3. To what extent does the main question of the source you found match with your own questions?
  4. How strong are the similiarities between the research object or the analysis unit in the piece you found and those in your own paper/thesis? The research object may be a period, or a person, a group, an area, a substance, a disease, a proces etc.
  5. Is the context of the research object the same as in your case?
  6. When was the piece published and when was the research written about executed?

Think that you will rarely find a source that provides a complete answer to your main questions and sub-questions.

In the special LibGuide Evaluating Sources you will find more information.

Evaluating search results: how scientific are they?

The  reliability  (scientific nature) of sources can be verified by three kinds of checks:

  1. Check by others, before publication
    • editors: editors of scientific journals are stricter than editors of non-scientific journals
    • publisher: some publishers only publish scientific books
    • peer review: some journals but also some book publishers ask experts for a (blind) judgment before publication
    • search engine/online bibliography: some search engines only include articles from high-quality peer reviewed journals (for instance Scopus and Web of Science) 
    • financier: some journals demand that the names are published of those who have funded the research
  2. Check by others, after publication
    • reviews (in the case of books): is the book review positive?
    • citations (particularly in the case of articles:): how many times is the article cited and especially; what is said about the article?
  3.  Your own check:
    • who is the author and when was the article published (especially with web pages)
    • affiliation of the author: the job may tell you more, for instance if the author is employed by a (good) university
    • what is the intended audience of the publication (for websites and reports) 
    • how explicit is the phrasing of the question? Does the article contain conclusions?
    • is the used method explained: how was the research organised, where do the data come from?
    • are there enough references? Are they of high quality?: on which insights is the theory based?
    • language use: level and grammaticality

In the special LibGuide Evaluating sources   you will learn how to deal with these matters