Evaluate Sources - A Self-Guided Tutorial: Home

What Does It Mean to Evaluate?

To evaluate information is to critically examine it to determine if it is appropriate to support your claims or argument. In research (and in life), we are usually looking for credible and accurate sources.

There really is no such thing as a bad source, but there are sources that are more or less appropriate to support your argument. For example, a source might be a highly skewed opinion piece, but if it provides evidence for you to explain how a group of people perceives an issue, it might be completely appropriate to cite to it.  

By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to:

1. Recognize how context informs source selection and how you then use a source to support your argument.
2. Evaluate information across a variety of media types (e.g., video, social media, news, research articles, etc) for credibility, accuracy of information, and relevance.
3. Synthesize sources to bring them together and apply in your work, writing, and presentations.
4. Critique generative artificial intelligence (genAI) tools and output.

How to use this tutorial:

• This is a self-guided tutorial so you can jump into any area that you want to know more about or go through the entire tutorial from start to finish.
• Navigate to different pages from the tabs in the left-hand navigation.
• For more advanced researchers, look for the "want to know more" sections which have more information about the topic.