Welcome back to my blog! This week I want to discuss important things to keep in mind when searching and researching something of interest or for academic reasons. More specifically, the source credibility of a resource you are considering on using. Firstly, you want your resource to be reliable. What I mean by this is that you want the information you have found to be accurate and informative. Some question you can ask yourself to help determine the source reliability is : Is their contact info available? What are the credentials of the author? What is the reputation of the publisher ? Also what is the type of document and who is the publisher? A couple type of reliable domains include .gov, .edu and .org to name a few. Be careful when using .org because some websites like wikipedia, wikibooks, wikiversity give broad generalization and aren’t reliable when conducting research. There are many deceiving results that come up in your search engine and it is important to identify them and not include them in your research. Secondly, you want quality. Some characteristics that can help you identify good quality information is : is the information biased? Are there external sources that were used and cited in citations ? Was it well written ? The third thing to keep in mind is utility. In other words, how is the research related to your topic and do you have an appropriate audience? Part of conducting good research includes narrowing your search and giving external information that is relevant and on topic. This will give you better credentials and make your research more accurate. Remember that is is possible to give too much information that doesn’t directly correlate to your research and always remember the saying quality over quantity!
I hope you found this information to be as helpful as I did! For more information on college related topics, tune in next week!