Evaluating Sources Tutorial Evaluating Sources Tutorial This tutorial will help you be able to select quality sources for any assignment. Your credibility in your research project depends on the sources you use to support it. If you use sources that are of poor quality, what reason would anyone have to trust the points you are making? This five-minute video will teach you three questions you can ask to determine whether a source is a good fit for your needs. Your needs depend on the types of evidence you are looking for, the points you want to make, and the requirements of your assignment. Example News Article Evaluation Now, let's look at how we might evaluate an article we found on the Web. You can access the article we're exploring -- Will DACA Parents Be Forced to Leave Their U.S.-Citizen Children Behind? -- at https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/donald-trump-daca/543519/ First, I'm going to look into the author. I can click on her name in the article and get a short biography that says that she's a former assistant editor at The Atlantic (the magazine in which this article is published). I'm also going to Google her name to find out more about her. From my Google search, I learn that she is a reporter for CNN currently and used to work for USA Today. A journalist who has been hired by at least three major national news sources is probably a pretty good journalist and I see that she specializes in immigration news, so this is an area she spends a lot of time researching. Journalists are not necessarily experts in everything they write about, but they are experts at pulling information together from other expert sources (like researchers, people working in that area, people affected by the thing she's writing about) to tell a story. I feel pretty good about trusting Priscilla Alvarez writing on the issue of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Next, I'm going to look at the publication to see what their reputation is. I could just look at their "About" page, but of course that is going to say positive things about them. So instead, I'm going to Google The Atlantic. What I see in the Google search results (beyond their own website) is a Wikipedia article. Usually that will tell me a lot about the publication and if there are any concerns or controversies. Nothing I see in the Wikipedia article concerns me and it shows me that The Atlantic is a respected, award-winning national news publication that has been around for over 150 years. If I wanted to dig deeper, I might go to the website Media Bias Fact Check https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ to see how they rate the publication. They suggest that it has a left-center bias and that their factual reporting is high. Most publications you will find will have some bias, but you want to make sure that, even if they have a bias, what they are publishing is truthful. This suggests that The Atlantic posts factual stories with a left-center bias. If I were writing a paper trying to convince a very conservative audience of something, The Atlantic might not be the best source to use because it is a somewhat liberal publication, but if I'm writing for a more general audience, this is a solid and well-respected source. Because journalists are not usually experts on the particular things they are writing about, their work is only as good as the sources they use. So it's worth looking at where their information came from. In some articles and books, you'll find a list of cited sources as the end of the article or chapter, but news articles usually list their sources more informally within the body of the article. I'll highlight a few examples below: You can see just in these three paragraphs that the author got information from 1) a mother who is a DACA recipient, 2) the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and 3) a research study. This alone suggests that this is a well-researched article where she is looking at the government response, scholarly research on the topic, and has talked to real people who are impacted by the issue. That is a great mix of sources and is a great example actually of the sort of mix many instructors want to see in your own research. Based on the three areas I looked into (the author, the publication or website, and the sources used), I feel pretty confident using this in my research. Next, you're going to look at two other articles about DACA and will analyze them using the same methods I used here. Next Never submit passwords through Google Forms. This form was created inside of Portland Community College. Report Abuse  Forms