R3-b: Selecting sources worth your time and attention
As you search for sources in databases, the library catalog, and search engines, you’re likely to locate many more results than you can read or use. This section explains how to scan through the results for the most promising sources and how to preview them to see whether they meet your needs.
Scanning search results
MORE HELP IN YOUR HANDBOOK
Annotating bibliography entries can help you evaluate sources.
Maintaining a working bibliography: R2-a
Summarizing sources: A1-c
Analyzing sources: A1-d
Considering how sources inform your argument: MLA-1c, APA-1c, CMS-1c
As you scan through a list of search results, look for clues indicating whether a source might be useful for your purposes or not worth pursuing. You will need to use somewhat different strategies when scanning search results from a database, a library catalog, and a Web search engine.
databases Most databases list at least the following information, which can help you decide if a source is relevant, current, and scholarly (see the chart at the end of this section).
The title and brief description (How relevant?)
A date (How current?)
The name of periodical (How scholarly?)
The length (How extensive in coverage?)
Many databases allow you to sort your list of results by relevance or date; sorting may help you scan the information more efficiently.
library catalogs The library’s catalog usually lists basic information about books, periodicals, DVDs, and other material—enough to give you a first impression. As in database search results, the title and date of publication of books and other sources listed in the catalog will often be your first clues as to whether the source is worth consulting. If a title looks interesting, you can click on it for information about the subject matter and length. For books, reports, or other long sources, a table of contents may also be available.
web search engines Reliable and unreliable sources live side-by-side online. As you scan through search results, look for the following clues about the probable relevance, currency, and reliability of a Web site.
The title, keywords, and lead-in text (How relevant?)
A date (How current?)
An indication of the site’s sponsor or purpose (How reliable?)
The URL, especially the URL ending: for example, .com, .edu, .gov, or .org (How relevant? How reliable?)
Below are a few of the results that student writer Luisa Mirano retrieved after typing the keywords childhood obesity into a search engine; she limited her search to works with those words in the title.
Mirano found the first site, sponsored by a research-based organization, promising enough to explore for her paper. The second and fourth sites held less promise because they seemed to offer popular rather than scholarly information. In addition, the second site was full of distracting advertisements. Mirano rejected the third source not because she doubted its reliability—in fact, research from the National Institutes of Health was what she hoped to find—but because a skim of its contents revealed that the information was too general for her purposes.
evaluating search results: internet search engine
Previewing sources
Once you have decided that a source looks promising, preview it quickly to see whether it lives up to its promise. If you can evaluate as you search, rejecting irrelevant or unreliable sources before actually reading them, you will save yourself time.
previewing an article
- Consider the publication in which the article is printed. Is it a scholarly journal (see the chart below)? A popular magazine? A newspaper with a national reputation?
- For a magazine or journal article, look for an abstract or a statement of purpose at the beginning; also look for a summary at the end.
- For a newspaper article, focus on the headline and the opening paragraphs for relevance.
- Scan any headings and look at any visuals—charts, graphs, diagrams, or illustrations—that might indicate the article’s focus and scope.
previewing a book
- Glance through the table of contents, keeping your research question in mind. Even if the entire book is not relevant, parts of it may be useful.
- Scan the preface in search of a statement of the author’s purposes.
- Use the index to look up a few words related to your topic.
- If a chapter looks useful, read its opening and closing paragraphs and skim any headings.
previewing a web site
- Check to see if the sponsor is a reputable organization, a government agency, or a university. Is the group likely to look at only one side of a debatable issue?
- If you have landed on an internal page of a site and no author or sponsor is evident, try navigating to the home page, either through a link or by truncating the URL (see the tip in R1-d).
- Try to determine the purpose of the Web site. Is the site trying to sell a product? Promote an idea? Inform the public? Is the purpose consistent with your research?
- If the Web site includes statistical data (tables, graphs, charts), can you tell how and by whom the statistics were compiled? Is research cited?
- Find out when the site was created or last updated. Is it current enough for your purposes?
Selecting appropriate versions of digital sources
An online source may appear as an abstract, an excerpt, or a full-text article or book. It is important to distinguish among these versions of sources and to use a complete version of a source, preferably one with page numbers, for your research.
Abstracts and excerpts are shortened versions of complete works. An abstract—a summary of a work’s contents—might appear in a database record for a source and can give you clues about the usefulness of the source for your research. An excerpt is the first few sentences or paragraphs of a newspaper or magazine article and sometimes appears in a list of results from an online search. Abstracts and excerpts often provide enough information for you to determine whether the complete article would be useful for your paper. Both are brief (usually fewer than five hundred words) and generally do not contain enough information to function alone as sources in a research paper. Reading the complete article is the best way to understand the author’s argument before referring to it in your own writing. A full-text work may appear online as a PDF file or as an HTML file (sometimes called a text file). If your source is available in both formats, choose the PDF file for your research because you will be able to cite specific page numbers.
Determining if a source is scholarly
For many college assignments, you will be asked to use scholarly sources. These are written by experts for a knowledgeable audience and usually go into more depth than books and articles written for a general audience. (Scholarly sources are sometimes called refereed or peer-reviewed because the work is evaluated by experts in the field before publication.) To determine if a source is scholarly, look for the following:
- Formal language and presentation
- Authors who are academics or scientists
- Footnotes or a bibliography documenting the works cited by the author in the source
- Original research and interpretation (rather than a summary of other people’s work)
- Quotations from and analysis of primary sources (in humanities disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy)
- A description of research methods or a review of related research (in the sciences and social sciences)
note: In some databases, searches can be limited to refereed or peer-reviewed journals.