Costa Rica Winter25: Evaluating 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evaluate all sources you encounter, especially those you find outside the library databases or sources that are not peer-reviewed.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!