4.4: Evaluate Your Sources

Once you’ve found websites on your topic, you need to decide which ones to take seriously. Some feel that a positive attitude is the key to success in life, but in the case of the Internet, your attitude should be deep suspicion unless the source is official and you can confirm the site is what it pretends to be. Numerous credible web sources with a known pedigree can be found through the MSFRIC (http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/lane.htm). Domain searches of .mil, .gov, or .edu may lead you to some of the more credible sources, but factual errors may be present in any domain and there are many sites that may be factually incorrect or deliberately misleading.

When looking at a website, ask yourself some questions. Who is responsible for the website and can you confirm that? How distant are the authors from the "event" they are writing about? (See the section later in this chapter on primary, secondary and tertiary sources.) What are the authors’ motives? Are they part of a group whose goal is to influence public opinion or to sell you something? Are there things about the site that make you question its accuracy, objectivity or currency? Take a look at the checklist on the next page for more specifics to add to your paranoia.

Another way to build confidence in the information you gather is to seek confirmation of the facts from multiple sources. The weaker the source, the more important it is to get a second opinion before believing it. Most of us instinctively do this in the workplace-we have a very short list of people we absolutely believe every time they open their mouths (these folks usually don’t talk much!), we have a longer list of people who are right most of the time and then there’s usually one or two who have no credibility whatsoever. If the issue is important and you want to be sure, try to get the answer in stereo.

• \(<\) evaluating web sources site: edu \(>\) searches university sites for criteria and tips on evaluating web resources. There are some excellent such sites.
• \(<\) evaluating web sources site: loc.gov \(>\) searches the Library of Congress site for help with evaluating online sources.

While the guide on the following page provides an excellent overview of evaluating a web source, you may want to do the searches above to see if any new criteria come into play as the Internet continues to evolve. Social media, blogs and crowd-sourced references may need additional methods for evaluating their accuracy, currency and other criteria.

A note on Wikis, Blogs, e-journals and social media posts. The central goal of the Internet is the sharing of information. However, as access to the electronic archives has improved, so have the posts of less credible sources. This is not to say that the information found from a less credible source is wrong or invalid, but it is to say that the quality and credibility of an argument is only as good as the quality and credibility of the sources used. So how do you use these types of sources in your research? The Tongue and Quill recommends that wikis, blogs, e-journals and social media be treated as bread crumbs on the trail to creating basic understanding of a topic and any corollary issues that may be relevant. The fact is just about everyone uses these sources to get started in finding out more on a topic-be it from the news of the day to more challenging staff research. However, these sites are not considered authoritative and should not be sited as the evidence to support any claim in a credible research effort of any kind. Bottom Line: Wikis can get you intellectually started but there are no shortcuts for obtaining valid, credible, authoritative content to support claims-you must do some digging.

When evaluating a source, one factor to consider is the distance between the writer and his or her subject. Since people and their research are often misquoted, it’s better to refer back to original material than rely on someone else’s interpretation of existing work. This is true for research published in books and print journals, as well as Internet sites. The material you find can be classified as either a primary, secondary or tertiary source.

• A primary source is a first-hand account of an historical event, a physical artifact or record of that event or a description of research written by the people that actually performed it.
• A secondary source is one step removed from the event or research. It documents the findings of someone else who took the time to review primary sources.
• A tertiary source summarizes findings published in secondary sources.

Let’s look at some examples. If you were doing research on a friendly fire incident, primary sources would include interviews of the parties involved, radio recordings, gun camera footage and black box recordings. The Summary of Official Findings published by the investigation board would be a secondary source. A tertiary source might be a magazine article that quoted the Summary of Official Findings as part of a larger discussion on the topic.

If you wanted to learn about the foundations of logic and persuasion in Western culture, a primary source would be essays on the subject by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, a secondary source would be an academic textbook that refers back to these writings and a tertiary source would be a lecture given by an instructor that used the academic textbook as a reference.

In general, primary and secondary sources are considered more reliable than tertiary sources. Each level of interpretation can introduce potential errors or bias and ideas can be misquoted or quoted out of context. On the other hand, sometimes a tertiary source might be useful to get a "big picture view" of a topic before you start slogging through primary and secondary sources.