Skip to Main Content

Boatwright Memorial Library

Evaluating Sources

This work is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0

Interactive Tutorial

Want to test your comprehension? The interactive tutorial below includes a quiz beforehand and a post-tutorial quiz to verify that you have learned the information.

More on Evaluating Sources

Website Evaluation

On the World Wide Web, scholarly researchers face the challenge of navigating and extracting useable information from over 100 million indexed sites and over 46 billion pages. Here are some signs of a good scholarly web resource:

Trusted URLs

.edu, .gov, .mil contain the most reliable and unbiased info

Authority

Look for the author's name, credentials and affiliation to give clues to the contents' quality and objectivity. You should expect the same information quality from a web page as you would from a scholarly print or database source. For pages authored by organizations, look for the site's "About Us" section.

Currency

When was the page created or last updated?

Bibliography

Sources used for the page should be cited and working links provided for more information on the topic.

Accuracy

Trustworthy sites should not have spelling, grammatical or factual errors.