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Research Guides

Art H 400 Legacies of Slavery and the Civil War in American Art: Evaluating Resources

Research guide to resources

Evaluating Resources

Books and articles:

  • Don’t just look at the title and abstract/contents
  • Who is the author?  What are their credentials?  What else have they written?
  • Are others in the field citing this person’s work?
  • Who is the publisher? 
    • Academic press
    • Academic or professional association, for example, The
      Association for Art History
    • Major commercial publisher or imprint
    • Specialized or niche publisher
    • Self-published
    • No publisher identified
  • If factual information is presented, can you corroborate it?  Is the author just cherry-picking facts to fit their argument?  Do they supply the source of their data?
  • What’s the purpose of the work?
  • Is it relevant to your research?
  • Is the information outdated?

 

Websites:

Instead of reading vertically, meaning staying within a site to evaluate it by looking at its organization, logos, domain name, currency, etc., try reading laterally.  “Lateral readers don’t spend time on the page or site until they’ve first gotten their bearings by looking at what other sites and resources say about the source at which they are looking,” from Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.

For more on lateral reading, see “What ‘Reading Laterally’ Means”.

Activity: 

https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/chapter/activity-evaluate-a-site/
 

Activity: Evaluate a Site by Michael A. Caulfield from Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.