Using evidence in your research is a lot like building a house. You want to make it solid with high quality materials. You can use flimsy evidence and your research assignment will not stand up to scrutiny, or a wolf -- much like a house of sticks. But use a variety of high quality sources, and your work will be rock solid. In this video, you’ll learn about questions to ask that will help you select the best sources for your particular needs. Let’s look at these two sources about buying local. The first is an article from a scholarly journal about Agribusiness written by two economics experts. The second is a blog post by a woman about her experience trying to eat entirely local for a month. It doesn’t look like it’s been reviewed by anyone else and the woman who wrote it doesn’t appear to have relevant education. Many people, when asked, would probably say that the first source was better. But what does that really mean? It’s written by someone with more education, but if you’re trying to explain the challenges people face in eating local, the second one might actually be a more useful source. Sources aren’t good or bad in and of themselves; they’re good or bad depending on how well they fit your needs. Your needs are determined by the points you’re trying to make, questions you’re trying to answer, and your assignment requirements. Therefore, something that might be really good for one purpose might not be for another. There are, however, questions that you should ask about any source. Based on the answers to these questions and your specific information needs, you should be able to determine which sources are best for your research. The first question - who wrote this and are they trustworthy? - is about the expertise of the author. Expertise means many things. Education. Professional Experience. Life experiences. Significant research. When you’re looking at a source, find out who wrote it. What about their background or knowledge makes them trustworthy? In some cases, you’ll find their qualifications listed in the article itself. Here you can see that the authors are both policy experts. In others, the author’s name will be linked to their biographical information. I can see here that this author is an education reporter and so has experience researching educational topics. Or there might be an about page. From her about page, I can see that this blog is written by someone who’s really passionate about eating local, but has no other particular expertise. If there’s no information provided about the author, you might want to do a web search for the author’s name to find out who they are. If you can’t find out anything about the author, look for information about the magazine, journal, or website to determine whether it’s a respected source. Whether their qualifications are enough is relative to how you want to use them as a source. If you’re looking for evidence based on research studies, an article by someone who has only experienced the thing you’re writing about is not ideal. However, a research study may not be the best source when it comes to providing a picture of the human dimension of the problem you’re researching. Having a variety of types of sources written by authors with different types of expertise will provide you with the strongest support for your research. We want information we can trust, and a big part of that is understanding the biases of the author or of the publication they’ve created the work for. A bias is a prejudice in favor or against something. It’s impossible to write something that is completely unbiased, since everything has a perspective, though authors try more or less to acknowledge multiple sides of an issue. When you’re looking at the article, consider its purpose. Is it trying to convince you of something? To inform? To sell you something? To get you to take action? A useful way to evaluate a source for bias is to look at the organization or website publishing it. Often, the title of the website or its About page will tell you a lot about their biases. For example, it may not surprise you to know that the National Right to Life News is against abortion. But you may not realize without the “About” page that the New Republic has a progressive left-wing bias. You know when you use a source like that that it’s likely using evidence in a particular way to sway its readers. Bias doesn’t necessarily make the source bad, but you need to determine whether that bias affects the accuracy of the information. Finally, it’s useful to look at where an author is getting his or her information from. Their use of solid evidence is just as important as yours and shows that the author is doing more than just presenting their opinion. With some articles, you’ll see the sources the author used at the end of their article. More often, you’ll have to investigate that yourself in the body of the article. For example, I can see here that this author got his information from a research study on local agriculture and an interview with the author of that study. Your research assignment is only as good as the quality of your sources. Brick by brick, you make your case in your research based on the sources you’ve gathered. You bring these experts into a conversation in your assignment. By evaluating and selecting the best sources for your needs, you’ll ensure that your research has a solid foundation. If you need support, ask a librarian. We’re here to help!