So far in my research on the topic of global warming, I have:

Now that I have found some sources, I have to decide which ones I will actually read carefully and use to answer my research questions.

In other words, I have to evaluate them. I can't just take the top six books or articles on my list-since, in this assignment, I had to use six sources-and hope for the best.

I need to evaluate each potential source for:

Relevance
A source is relevant if it gives me information that can help me answer my research questions. Just because my keywords appear in the title, the abstract, or the article itself does not automatically mean that the information will be relevant to my research.

Reliability
The reliability of a source depends on the credentials of the author(s). A source is reliable to the extent that the author(s) have a recognized expertise on the topic or appear well informed on the topic. They may have used information from others who are considered authorities on the topic and would have given them credit for their contribution through some kind of reference, such as a footnote.

Credibility
The credibility of a source depends on the way that the author(s) have presented their claims, the quality of evidence they have used to support them, and the way they have documented this support.

Objectivity
The objectivity of a source depends on the extent to which the author(s) have presented to material in an unbiased way that accounts for other opinions. Since it's not possible for author(s) to be completely objective, they at least try to be up front about their biases and treat differing views fairly.

Currency
The currency of a source depends on how well the information works within the time frame of my research questions. For example, if I am researching the current thinking about global warming, the source needs to up to date. However, if I were looking at how thinking about global warming has changed over the past twenty years, sources written twenty years ago could be helpful.

LOOKING BACK

If I think back to the research I did for buying a car, I evaluated my sources then, too-even it I didn't know that was what I was doing. And I used different sources to help me answer different research questions.

I asked these questions:

And in order to find answer I decided to:

So, for example, when I wanted to find out how dependable the car might be, I asked the mechanic everyone in my family swears by (reliability). He was able to tell me in a straight forward way (credibility/objectivity) about the condition of the car at that moment (currency). But he said he couldn't tell me how well the car's maintenance schedule had been kept up. For that, he said, I had have to look at the records the owner had kept.

BUT WHAT ABOUT EVALUATING INFORMATION FOUND ON A WEBSITE?

Although in this assignment on global warming I was not supposed to use information found only on websites, there will be times when I can use them.

How does evaluation work then?

Websites and the information found on them should be evaluated using the criteria listed for other sources-relevance, reliability, credibility, objectivity, and currency.

However, since anyone can put up a website, figuring out how well my website source meets these criteria can be challenging.

These websites found on Virginia Montecino's site (http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin) show different ways of evaluating the information found on websites you might want to use in your research: