Evaluating Information Sources
Navigating diverse information sources is crucial for civic engagement, quality of life, and college success. This includes traditional and digital forms across various communication modes.
Traditional sources like books, journalism, films, and academic journals are trusted for reliability due to editorial oversight and professional standards.
Digitally native sources such as wikis, blogs, forums, and social media offer real-time updates, crowd-sourced content, and diverse perspectives, but vary in quality and oversight.
The media mode – text, visual, audio – affects message impact and the nuanced treatment of ideas.
Tools for Evaluation
The Information Cycle
The term “Information Cycle” refers to the way that information is produced and distributed, and how it changes over time. Usually, it’s used to describe the progression of media coverage relating to a particular newsworthy event or topic, but it can also be applied to cultural and societal developments.
Understanding where a source fits into the information cycle is one step you can take to evaluate whether or not the source is appropriate for your project and personal information needs.
Scope, Depth, Format
Understanding the Information Cycle is just one of the ways to determine the scope and depth of an information source and whether it matches your information needs. Asking yourself these questions can also help you evaluate whether or not an information source is appropriate.
What are the gaps in my current knowledge about this topic?
What specific types of information would be most helpful to address my research needs?
In what formats (types of publications and media) might I find the information I’m looking for?
Am I considering all possible formats?
How might the format affect the information I’m finding?
A book can offer broad and in-depth views of a topic, whereas a news item offers information that is quickly digestible and timely. A journal article might tackle an aspect of a topic and view it through a specific theoretical framework, whereas a primary source (runway images, a data set, an artifact) might demand you come to your own conclusions. Certain forms of information, like good journalism, favor a multifaceted perspective, while others, like memoirs or oral histories, are about individual points of view. It’s up to you to understand what meets your needs.
I.F. I. A.P.P.L.Y.
IF I APPLY is a method for evaluating information sources that requires both personal steps and source-focused steps. Unlike some other evaluation “checklists,” it looks beyond the source and emphasizes mindfulness, fact-checking, and critical thinking.
Personal Steps:
I – Identify emotions attached to the topic
F – Find an overview or background information for the topic
I – have the Intellectual courage to seek authoritative voices on the topic outside of one’s own POV
Source Steps:
A – Authority - Does the author have education or experience in the field?
P – Purpose/Point of view of source – does the author have an agenda other than informing the audience?
P – Publisher – does the publisher have a vetting process? An agenda?
L – List of sources – is there a bibliography or are multiple sources referenced?
Y – Year of Publication – is the date of publication timely or current.
