For a college writing assignment in any discipline, you can often locate dozens or even hundreds of potential sources for your topic—far more than you will have time to read. Your challenge will be to determine what kinds of sources you need and to zero in on a reasonable number of quality sources. This kind of decision making is referred to as evaluating sources. When you evaluate a source, you make a judgment about how useful the source is to your project. Evaluating requires you to ask critical questions about sources as you plan, as you search, as you read, and as you write—all the while keeping an open mind.

Evaluating sources isn’t something you do in one sitting. Being an effective researcher doesn’t mean following a formula (find some sources > evaluate those sources > write the paper). Rather, it means looking at the process as more dynamic. After you do some planning, searching, and reading, for example, you may reflect on the information you have and conclude that you need to rethink your research question—and so you may return to assessing the kinds of sources you need. Or you may be midway through drafting your paper when you begin to question a particular source’s credibility, at which point you return to searching and reading.