Chapter 5 is all about reviewing and evaluating your sources that you have found for your topic. You must examine a source's relevance, the evidence, the author, the publisher, the timelines, the comprehensiveness, and the genre. If a source is relevant, it pertains to your topic and how it can help contribute to your paper. To evaluate evidence, ask yourself if there is enough evidence to support the author's reasoning, if the right evidence is being used and being used fairly, and if the the evidence is reliable. The author is another aspect to evaluate. If they've written something about a topic, the author should be knowledgeable and educated about the topic. You should also watch out to see if they were biased or used their own opinions too much in the source. Along with evaluating the author, you should also evaluate the publisher.You evaluate the publisher in a similar way that you evaluate the author - make sure they are credible! A timeline, or the source's publication date, is very important, because you want information that is updated, not 20 years old. make sure you keep this in mind when evaluating your sources. To evaluate the comprehensiveness, you want to make sure that the source "provides a complete and balanced view of the topic". The last thing that this chapter says to evaluate is the genre, or document type.Is it a blog entry, a professional journal article, or from a web site? When evaluating the genre see if the style or writing is formal or informal, how evidence is used, how it is organized, and if information was cited.
The next part of this chapter goes more into detail about how to evaluate difficult sources - digital and field sources. The reason it is harder to evaluate these sources is because anyone can start or create a web site or blog or contribute to a discussion post. They aren't usually edited or published by professionals. The chapter gives you a specific tutorial page to evaluate a website including checking it's domain (.com, .edu, etc.), checking timelines,and checking the headers and footers. To evaluate a forum or a social networking site, try to find the original author's page. You can check FAQ to find out the purpose of the group. Also find out if a page is run by people who delete harmful or unpopular comments or posts because it can be misleading if not all comments are posted. To evaluate Wiki's, which are "websites that can be added to or edited by visitors to the site", take notice of whether sources for the page are cited, and who all have contributed to the page. The safest thing to do regarding Wiki's is to not use them. You can't be certain which information is real or not, unless you go find that information elsewhere in a credible source. After the chapter tells us how to evaluate digital sources, it briefly tells us how to evaluate field source. Field sources are observations, surveys, or interviews. Some questions to ask when you are evaluating information from field search are: Is the information I collected still relevant, were the individuals you interviewed as knowledgeable as you expected, were questions that you asked answered honestly, and did you give people who took surveys enough time to complete them.
Evaluating sources is very important for the research paper and I will use these guidelines a lot to determine whether my sources are reliable, accurate, and useful.
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