Evaluate Your Sources

We recommend you use the following 4 criteria together to evaluate your sources:

• Authority
• Credibility
• Purpose
• Timeliness

A few overall suggestions for evaluating information:

• You can use lateral reading to help you evaluate the authority, credibility, and purpose of your sources (see more about lateral reading below).

• This is probably obvious, but before you evaluate your sources, you need to have sources to evaluate.

  If you don't have any sources yet, you can start from the search box on the library homepage.

• We also assume that you have taken a brief look at your sources to make sure that the sources:
  • Are relevant to your topic
  • Meet the requirements of your assignment

Lateral reading is "the act of verifying what you’re reading as you’re reading it." (Heick, 2020). It's a strategy that you can use to evaluate the authority, credibility, and purpose of your source. There have always been people that put false information online, and unfortunately, AI makes it easier to do this. We don't think AI is at fault for this, but it's good to be aware that AI has brought some new challenges to identifying false information. 

The most common way to verify what you're reading is to Google it - for example, if you want more information about the author of a piece, you can Google them. However, you can also consult specific sources like websites (ex. factcheck.org is useful for verifying political claims) and people (ex. your professors and librarians can tell you if a publisher is reputable). 

Sometimes you will be unable to determine whether something is true or false - because there isn't any information about the author, source, etc. That's usually a good reason to be skeptical of what you're reading. 

The following video provides a brief (about 4 minute) overview of lateral reading along with a real-life example of how to go about using lateral reading. 

Sources for this section