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Using and Evaluating Sources

This guide explains how to use sources to support your ideas and how to evaluate them to make sure you're using the best sources for your purposes

So-called "popular" or non-scholarly sources include such things as websites, blogs, newspapers, magazines or e-zines, social media, streaming services or television/radio, etc. These types of sources ALWAYS need to be evaluated. That's because popular sources could be heavily biased, or even non-factual. Anybody can pretend to be an expert on anything. Popular sources can also be wildly out-of-date: some online information lingers for years or even decades after it's no longer useful.

Evaluating Popular Sources

When evaluating popular sources online, one of the best strategies you can use is called lateral reading. With lateral reading, you don't spend very much time on the website itself, but instead explore the rest of the web to see what other people are saying about the source.

Lateral reading asks you to consider:

  • What are reliable sources that you trust saying about the source that you are viewing?
  • Is there a Wikipedia page on the organization that published the source? How does it categorize the organization? Do other sources on the internet also categorize the organization in this way?
  • What can you find out about who founded the site and how it is funded?
  • Can you confirm the information you found in the source using other reliable sources? If you can't find five other trusted sources that report the same findings, that's an indication the source may not be very reliable.

View the video below for more information on lateral reading.