Marshall University Libraries - Undergraduate Students

1. Evaluating A Website

Can you trust the Web pages that you find on the Internet?

Are they appropriate resources for your research paper?

Here are some tips on how to evaluate a web page:

Criteria	Questions to Ask	Where to look for the answers
1. AUTHORITY / RESPONSIBILITY	Who is the author of the page? Is it an individual or a group? What are the author's qualifications to speak on this issue?	Look for authorship, responsible party information in: top & side navigation bars page headers, footers
2. PURPOSE	How would you describe the content of the page? What is the purpose of the page? (To entertain? To inform? To persuade? To deceive?)	Read "About." links or look for mission statements to determine the purpose of the site.
3. CURRENCY	When was the page last updated? Do the links work?	Look for evidence of currency by checking the footer for last update.
4. OBJECTIVITY	How objectively is the content presented? Is more than one side given?	Check out bias, advocacy Examine the URL: .com usually means selling you something is the bottom line .org can signal advocacy for a cause ~ in the address commonly signifies a personal page .gov or .edu are generally more authoritative sites, but examine any site closely
5. ACCURACY	Are there any misspellings or errors on the page?	Examine the body of the page for typos or other mistakes that can indicate whether or not the content is reliable sources or footnotes for any statistics or facts presented
6. APPROPRIATENESS	Would this page be an appropriate source for a research paper? Why or why not?	Do your answers to the questions above add up to a good source?

The basic differences between popular and scholarly articles arise from the audience for which the periodical is written.

Criteria	Popular Magazines	Scholarly Journals

Audience	general public	scholars, students, professionals
Appearance	lots of color, advertising, illustrations, short articles	mostly text, black & white, graphs & charts, long articles with bibliographies & footnotes
Content	feature articles on timely topics; written for a general audience in a language that is easy to understand	researched and footnoted articles; written for a specialized audience in a vocabulary that is not easily understood by the average reader
Author(ity)	written by staff & freelance writers; checked by editors	authored by researchers, academics, specialists; peer-reviewed
Examples	Time; Business Week; People	The Journal of American History; Signs

Where can I find scholarly articles? Use an index or online database to locate several articles on a topic.

STARTING POINTS: EBSCOHost's Academic Search Premier is a general periodical databases, will provide some full-text scholarly articles as well as citations to others that are not full-text. An option for limiting the search to scholarly/peer-reviewed articles is available in each database.
FOLLOW UP with a specialized database that covers the topic area. Most specialized databases contain citations and occasionally full-text articles that are primarily from scholarly publications. For assistance with selecting an appropriate specialized database, consult a librarian at the Reference Desk.