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Allied Health Resources: Evaluating Resources - Tutorials & Guides

How to evaluate your sources

An extremely important part of the research process is evaluating your sources.  With each source, you want to answer questions to check the credibility of the information.

 

What to look for:

AUTHOR:

The author and website should provide information about their knowledge and qualifications.

  • Who wrote the article and who created the website?
     
  • What are their qualifications (education, experience, etc.)?
     
  • Do you trust them to know what they are talking about?
     
  • Is there a way to contact them?

 

RELIABLE:

The information should be accurate with documentation and evidence to show that it is true.

  • What information does the website provide?
     
  • Is the information primarily facts or opinion?  How do you know?
     
  • Are there citations and references to support the information provided?
  • Are there statistics to support the information provided?
     
  • If there are links, do they work?

 

PURPOSE: 

Decide the purpose of the website by looking closely at the information.

  • What is the purpose of the article and website?
     
  • How can you tell if the information is either objective or biased?
     
  • Is the creator/author trying to sell you something?
     
  • What is the domain (.edu, .org, .com, etc.) and how might that influence the purpose of the website?

Tutorial: How to Evaluate Health Resources on the Internet

It is extremely important to evaluate the sources of the information you find on the Internet, especially medical information.

Because anyone can put information on the web, so you need to be able to verify the credibility of the source and the information provided on the web sites you use for your research and studies.  

Here is a short 16 minute tutorial on how to evaluate the health related information you will find on the web. 

Source:

NIH: National Library of Medicine

  

Watch: Evaluating Websites

Portland Community College Library