Why Evaluate?
Different things may come to mind when hearing "evaluation": you might think of a text's quality, appropriateness, and perhaps relevance. These are all potential reasons to evaluate your sources: you must be mindful of how and why you would include any piece of research in your own work, and you must also consider how your audience might react to its inclusion.
Some may think that source evaluation is only needed for popular or internet-based sources, but all sources should be evaluated, even peer reviewed research that is held up as the "gold standard" in academic writing.
It is impossible to outline steps or criteria for the evaluation of all sources -- evaluation is highly contextual, particularly when considering relevance for any individual research inquiry. However, developing habits of practice for evaluating research will serve you well in developing your ability to make such judgments.
What Evaluation Means
We might be tempted to consider an article's status as being peer reviewed as doing our evaluative work for us: many understand this as a signal that a source is unimpeachable. But scholarly writing must be evaluated like any other source, though there may be different strategies to do so.
Peer review is of course a meaningful data point for evaluation. This process ensures that a piece of writing has followed the baseline expectations and accepted methods within a disciplinary community (the people who study a particular field or topic). We must verify that a source is in fact peer reviewed, and we should also consider who the authors are, the quality of the publication, and how up-to-date it is within the scholarly conversation.
But researchers disagree all the time! If we have two equally authoritative authors opposing one another in two publications of equal quality, how can we make a judgment about their respective arguments? To truly evaluate scholarly sources, we need to look a little more closely at the details of their work: the level of engagement with previous research, the evidence presented, and the reasoning stitching it all together.
It is challenging work -- but this is how knowledge is developed!
SIFT:
- Stop,
- Investigate the source,
- Find better or other coverage, and
- Trace back to source.
(Image Credit: NWTC Library.)
Mike Caulfield's SIFT Method is a very efficient means of evaluating the kinds of sources we encounter on the internet and in mass media. It takes advantage of the fact that we have the vast power of the internet to find information about authors, publishers, and other sources of information to verify and judge the trustworthiness of any text we might find. Below you will find a brief series of videos from Caulfield describing in greater detail how this method works.
- Online Verification Skills with Mike CaulfieldA series of lessons by the creator of the SIFT method to help you quickly and effectively evaluate sources on the internet.
Lateral Reading for the Web
The SIFT Method is informed by the concept of "lateral reading," which refers to seeking outside sources to help evaluate a source rather than simply reading the original source more carefully. Careful reading is necessary, but for texts that we cannot immediately verify, lateral reading is a particularly effective strategy. The video above from the Digital Inquiry Group describes how to make this work for you.
- Civic Online Reasoning VideosAdditional lessons and guidance from the Digital Inquiry Group's curriculum. Provides further and more detailed strategies for evaluating web sources.
