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6.04: Chapter 26: Finding and Evaluating Research Sources

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    Chapter 26: Finding and Evaluating Research Sources

    Rebekah Bennetch, Corey Owen, and Zachary Keesey

    Learning Objectives

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

    • Distinguish between popular sources and scholarly sources
    • Identify different types of sources that can be used for technical projects
    • Evaluate research sources with a critical lens by considering their authority, content, and purpose

    Key Terms and Concepts

    • scholarly sources
    • popular sources
    • authority, content, and purpose

    Finding and Evaluating Research Source s

    While going through Bitzer and Aristotle’s rhetorical theory, you will need to start looking up some sources you can use for your report. Perhaps you already know of some sources that you can pull from. If you don’t have any sources in mind, or don’t know how to even start looking for them, that’s okay too. We’ll talk more about strategies for conducting research in the next chapter. Right now, we want to make sure you know how to properly evaluate the sources you do find when you start your research.

    Popular vs Scholarly Sources

    In this “information age,” when so much information is available at our fingertips on the Internet, it is crucial to be able to critically search through the reams of information in order to select credible sources that can provide reliable data to support your ideas and convince your audience. In the era of “fake news,” deliberate misinformation, and “alternative facts,” developing the skill to evaluate the credibility of sources is critical.

    Sources can be broken up into two categories: popular and scholarly. How would you define the difference between the two? Can you come up with some examples of both? Ideally, when you think of both categories, you should think of items such as those in the figure below.

    Popular-vs-Scholarly.jpg

    Figure #1 Examples of Popular vs Scholarly Sources. [1]

    Why are scholarly sources more desirable than popular sources? Is it ever a good idea to use one source type over the other in the report writing process? Let’s look at this a little more deeply. Watch the video below to help distinguish between the two.

    Thumbnail for the embedded element "Scholarly and Popular Sources- UVic Libraries Research Help video"

    A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://pb.libretexts.org/effective/?p=124

    Link to Original Video: tinyurl.com/scholarsource

    Scholarly articles published in academic journals are usually required sources in professional communication; they are also an especially integral part of engineering projects and technical reports. Since you are researching in a professional field and preparing for the workplace, there are many credible kinds of sources you will draw on in a professional context. How many can you list? Table #1 below lists several types of sources you may find useful in researching your projects.

    Table #1: Typical Research Sources for Technical Projects

    The original version of this chapter contained H5P content. You may want to remove or replace this element.

    Download: Typical Research Sources for Technical Projects

    Critically Evaluating Sources

    Clearly, there are a lot of places where you can pull sources from. However—and this is a big however—it is essential that you critically evaluate your sources for authority, content, and purpose.

    Anyone can put anything on the internet, and people with strong web and document design skills can make this information look very professional and credible, even if it isn’t. Since a majority of research is currently done online, and many sources are available electronically, developing your critical evaluation skills is crucial to finding valid, credible evidence to support and develop your ideas. In fact, this has become such a challenging issue that there are sites like List of Predatory Journals that regularly update its online list of journals that subvert the peer review process and simply publish for profit.

    When evaluating research sources and presenting your own research, be careful to critically evaluate the authority, content, and purpose of the material, using the questions in Table #2.

    Table #2: Evaluating the Authority, Content and Purpose of the Information
    The original version of this chapter contained H5P content. You may want to remove or replace this element.

    Going through all those questions may seem like a tedious, unnecessary process, but it is essential that you consider these questions as you acquire sources for your reports. Not doing so can negatively impact your credibility as a professional.

    Consider it this way: let’s say you are presenting a report to a potential client. If they find out you used sources that lack authority, are not relevant or recent, or do not really serve their purpose, how will they view you? How will that affect their view of the company you work for?

    Ultimately, critical thinking lies at the heart of evaluating sources. You want to be rigorous in your selection of evidence, because once you use it in your paper, it will either bolster your own credibility or undermine it.

    Key Takeaways

    • Not all sources are created equal when it comes to research. There are two main categories: popular sources and scholarly sources. Of the two, scholarly sources are more credible because they have to go through a peer-review process in order to be published.
    • However, you still want to make sure you evaluate the sources your find for authority, content, and purpose regardless of where you found it.

    References

    Government of Canada, Statistics Canada [online]. Available: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/start

    Kurland, D. (2000). What is critical thinking? How the language really works: The fundamentals of critical reading and effective writing. https://www.criticalreading.com/critical_thinking.htm

    List of predatory journals. (n.d.). Stop Predatory Journals. https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/

    Attributions

    This chapter is adapted from Technical Writing Essentials (on BCcampus) by Suzan Last, and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

    Cover images from journals are used to illustrate difference between popular and scholarly journals, and are for noncommercial, educational use only.


    This page titled 6.04: Chapter 26: Finding and Evaluating Research Sources is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by .
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