Looking quickly at the various parts of a source can provide useful information and help you decide whether to explore that particular source more thoroughly. You are already familiar with some of these basic elements: title and subtitle, title page and copyright page, home page, table of contents, index, footnotes, and bibliography. Be sure to check other items as well.

• Abstracts—concise summaries of articles and books—routinely precede journal articles and are often included in indexes and databases.
• A preface or foreword generally discusses the writer’s purpose and thesis.
• Subheadings within the text can alert you to how much detail is given on a topic.
• A conclusion or afterword may summarize or draw the strands of an argument together.
• For a digital source, click on some of the links to see if they’re useful, and see if the overall design of the site is easy to navigate.