THEA 300: Evaluating

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The CRAAP test is just one method for determining what kind of quality a resource is. It's useful for all resources, but especially so for anything you find outside of the scholarly world.

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You will need to find scholarly articles to serve as a solid base for any arguments you make in your paper. Databases have all sorts in them, not just peer reviewed sources. Use the comparisons above to help you figure out if a particular article is scholarly or not. Note that a peer reviewed journal is only one piece of that. Even scholarly journals have opinion pieces, book  reviews, product reviews, etc.

Keywords are the first (and, often, most skipped) step in your research. We can talk about the same issues using completely different words; if you only identify one of those words to search, you might be drilling down in the wrong spot! Searches for a computer vs. a Dell vs. a desktop will get you very different results, after all. Below is one approach to coming up with alternate ways of thinking about your topic, though there are certainly other ways to do it as well. This isn't an exercise to do in your head, write it out!