Evaluate articles, websites, and other information sources to select the best evidence for your academic work. Resource evaluation depends on the context of the source and how it serves your purpose. You might use a different set of criteria to evaluate a scholarly article than you would for a website. Review the following evaluation schemes to decide which method works best for your assignment.
Developed by Meriam Library at California State University Chico, the CRAAP Test is a mnemonic tool to check if an information source is current, relevant, authoritative, accurate, and what the purpose is (2 min). This framework works well with scholarly literature, books, and popular reading materials.
Evaluating Sources by Western Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
Lateral reading strategies from the Stanford History Education Group to teaches students to effectively evaluate websites by turning to the broader web to learn about the website (4 minutes).
Credit: The Digital Inquiry Group (DIG) is an independent nonprofit organization established by the team behind the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG).
Mike Caulfield is a research scientist to studies digital misinformation. This 5 minute video demonstrates his SIFT method of four simple actions that helps students evaluate digital media.