This section teaches how to identify relevant and credible sources that you have most likely turned up on the Web and on your results pages of the library catalog, Google Scholar, and specialized databases. Relevant, credible sources will meet the information needs of your of your research project.

In order to evaluate a source, you have to answer two questions about it:

• Is this source relevant to my research question?
• Is this a credible source– a source my audience and I should be able to believe?

It’s important to determine relevance before credibility because no mater how credible a source is, if it’s not relevant to your research question it’s useless to you for this project.

Making Inferences: Good Enough for Your Purpose?

Sources should always be evaluated relative to your purpose – why you’re looking for information. But because there often aren’t clear-cut answers when you evaluate sources, most of the time it is inferences – educated guesses from available clues – that you have to make about whether to use information from particular sources.