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In making and supporting claims for academic arguments, writers use all kinds of evidence: data from journal articles; scholarly books; records from archives; blogs, wikis, social media sites, and other digital sources; personal observations and fieldwork; surveys; and even DNA. But such evidence doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, the quality of evidence — how and when it was collected, by whom, and for what purposes — may become part of the argument itself. Evidence may be persuasive in one time and place but not in another; it may convince one kind of audience but not another; it may work with one type of argument but not with the kind you are writing. The point is that finding “good” evidence for a research project is rarely a simple matter.