NE2V13003 Dutch Literature III: The Middle Ages: Determine the academic value of a source

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

Include references to do justice to the work of others. All insights which are based directly on the work of others must be referred to in a publication, regardless of the form such as direct inspiration, paraphrases or verbatim citations Academic standards require that you cite the sources you have used in doing your research. A Citation Style defines how you should refer to your sources in a research paper. When you install the Zotero plugin in Word and choose 'add reference' you get to choose your prefered citation style.

How you approach a text depends on what you want to achieve. We can identify three different reading strategies.

1. Exploratory Reading
   Read specific parts of the publication (title, introduction, conclusion) and scan the contents. 
2. Comprehensive Reading
   Read and try to understand the complete text, sentence by sentence.
3. Critical Reading.
   Form your own opinion about the text.

Exploratory reading will help you identify the literature relevant to your research. 

If you want to use information from websites other than regular scholarly articles and books you should be extra careful and think about the role you give that information in your argument or analysis.

Ask yourself the following questions when reading webpages and be extra careful if the answer is negative most of the times.

1. Is the name of the author/maker available (and do you know more about the author)?
2. Can you find an e-mailaddress of the author/maker?
3. Is the webpage free of (lots of) advertisements?
4. Is the use of language careful, not childish, correct?
5. Is it clear how the information on the page came about?
6. Are sources mentioned (so no phrases like "research shows that") without any quotation of sources?
7. Are claims well-founded (so no phrases like "as is common knowledge")?
8. Is it a balanced piece or does all information point in the same direction?
9. Is the author open about matters still unknown or uncertain?
10. Can you find when the page was written or updated?
11. Is the page unbiased or in any case without strongly political or commercial aims?

These questions do not relate of course to the use of scientific articles or e-books published on websites.