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BIOL 201/202

Resources for students in the introductory biology courses - Molecular and Cellular & Evolution and Ecology.

Evaluating Your Sources

Carefully evaluate all sources you encounter, especially those you find outside the library databases or sources that are not peer-reviewed. In your career, you may encounter many types of information including newspaper articles, investigative journalism, magazines, trade publications (news for a specific field, such as higher education or biotechnology), videos, and online websites. How can you tell if you're looking at a quality source?

  • The publisher or organization should be easy to spot
  • Google the organization - they should have a website, Wikipedia page, and be referenced in other sources
  • Pay careful attention to the date
  • If an individual author is listed, you should be able to find their credentials and area of expertise
  • Reliable sources list sources and accurately represent the claims in those sources
  • Click on a couple sources to see if their evidence is reliable
  • Google a few things about the source or click around on the website to see what they're all about
  • Be wary of broad or exaggerated claims such as "everyone says" or "many articles state", especially if they don't provide sources for those claims
  • When evaluating, also consider things like charts, graphs, images, and video

Many reputable scientific publications and journals also publish a "news" section. These tend to be much more reliable for scientific news than other types of news outlets. If you ever have questions, ask your professor or librarian!

Static Media Bias Chart

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