Library | Evaluating Information Resources

You will need to evaluate each resource you use for research, whether it is an online or print journal article, website, book, newspaper article, or any other source that you want to use in your searching paper, because not each book, article, or website relevant to your research, means that it is necessarily a reliable information source.It is important to remember that the information sources ( print and electronic collection) have been provided by the Library, already have been evaluated for inclusion among the Library’s resources.

on the other hand the web/internet information sources content is published without editorial review so you need to evaluate what you find on Internet:

On the web, anyone can, with no supervision or review at all, put up a web page.
On the Web, there is no systematic monitoring of much of what publishes so, we find a lot of Biases, hidden agendas, distorted perspectives, commercial promotions, inaccuracies.
There is no standard format for web sites. Web pages exhibit few clues regarding dates, author(s), and references are not always easy to locate.
Internet sources are also not stable. Web documents can be changed easily. And once changed, the original is gone forever unless a specific effort is made to preserve it.

Criteria	Printed	Electronic
Publication process	Traditional print sources go through an extensive publication process that includes editing and article review. The process has fact-checkers, multiple reviewers, and editors to ensure quality of publication.	Anyone with a computer and access to the Internet can publish a Web site or electronic document. Most Web documents do not have editors, fact-checkers, or other types of reviewers.
Publication information	Publication information such as date of publication, publisher, author, and editor are always clearly listed in print publications.	Dates of publication and timeliness of information are questionable on the Internet. Dates listed on Web sites could be the date posted, date updated, or a date may not be listed at all.
Authorship and affiliations	Print sources clearly indicate who the author is, what organization he/she is affiliated with, and when his/her work was published.	Authorship and affiliations are difficult to determine on the Internet. Some sites may have author and sponsorship listed, but many do not have.
Author qualifications	Qualifications of an author are almost always necessary for print sources. Only qualified authors are likely to have their manuscripts accepted for publication.	Even if the author and purpose of a website can be determined, the qualifications of the author are not always given.
Accuracy	In most traditional publications, external sources of information and direct quotations are clearly marked and identified.	Sources the author used or referred to in the text may not be clearly indicated in an Internet source.
Objectivity	While bias certainly exists in traditional publications, printing is more expensive and difficult to accomplish. Most major publishers are out to make a profit and will either not cater to special interest groups or will clearly indicate when they are catering to special interest groups.	The purpose of the online text may be misleading. A Web site that appears to be factual may actually be persuasive and/or deceptive.

There are many trusted sources on the internet. You just need to know How to search and to know what to find out. when we search on the Internet, we open a search engine and type in our subject terms. This brings way too many results, and way too many types of results. There are useful and trusted sources have been buried in these results (government organizations, educational institutions, professional organizations, libraries, museums, etc), but it’s hard to sift through

There is an easy way to get back more trusted websites from credible organizations and institutions. You can limit your search to a certain type of website (.org, .edu, .gov, etc). Just add site :.the top-level domain of the web site (:. gov) to the end of your search string