Creating Effective Research Assignments: A Guide for Faculty: Source Validity

• Emphasize the importance of scholarly sources in your assignment prompt.
  • Even if specific types of scholarly sources (such as peer-reviewed journal articles) are not required, you can make it clear that students at the undergraduate level are expected to use scholarly sources in much of their research, although web resources and news articles may be appropriate for background information and research on current events.

• Suggest types of sources to be used and not used, and explicitly encourage students to use specific library resources if it fits the parameters of the assignment.
  • Make sure the library provides access to any required sources, and that all students will have an equal opportunity to access these sources.
  • Try to strike a balance between recommending certain sources and creating a lengthy, prescribed list.  When possible, students should be encouraged to find and evaluate at least some of their sources on their own, rather than simply choosing all of their sources from a list provided by the instructor.

• Include a link to one or more of the library’s LibGuides in the assignment description, to help direct students toward the best resources for their research.
  • LibGuides direct students to the most pertinent library databases and other reliable resources in a given subject area.  They can help students to do their searching in the right places, which will help them choose valid and trustworthy sources.
    • All Guides Alphabetically

• Have an introductory assignment or activity that requires students to compare a peer-reviewed article on a topic with an article about that topic from a popular source, such as a website or a magazine.
  • Students can better understand the distinctions between popular and scholarly sources when they can compare examples of both side by side.  You may ask students to discuss differences and similarities on a variety of factors such as target audience, purpose, depth/length, article structure, and the readability/difficulty of the language used in the articles.
• Have an introductory assignment or activity that requires students to compare search results from a database and an Internet search engine.
  • This activity is similar to the article compare/contrast activity listed above, and can help students see the value of databases and other similar library resources in comparison to general search engines like Google.  You can ask students to work in pairs or small groups to perform the searches, and then review the results from each in terms of factors such as format, target audience, purpose, depth/length, structure, and the readability/difficulty of the language used in the results.
• Require students to both evaluate a provided set of sources and find and evaluate their own sources.
  • While similar to some of the previously-suggested activities, this gives students an opportunity to critically evaluate sources and then transfer those evaluative skills to sources that they have found on their own.

There are a lot of factors to consider when you are determining the trustworthiness -- the “credibility” -- of a source or a piece of information, regardless of where you find it. 

We used to use the CRAP test to avoid ending up trusting, well, crap. And even though we have to think about more than just these factors, these questions still give us a solid start.

Currency - How old is it, and is that information likely to be outdated by now? 

Reliability - Does this publisher or website have a solid reputation? 

Authority - Does the person or persons who created it actually know what they’re talking about on this topic? 

Purpose - Are these people trying to convince me of something, or do they have an agenda they are trying to push?

Lateral reading is the key to getting answers to these questions when you are evaluating information that you find on the “open web” (that is, the content on the internet that isn’t selected and provided to you by a trusted tool like a library database). 

In the case of AI-generated answers and content, there may not even be publishers or authors, per se, and the currency and bias of the material is dependent on whatever dataset the AI tool is using, which may not always be clear. So when content was created by AI, or when you can’t tell who created the content or where it came from, it’s important to confirm the factual claims themselves by confirming them using other, trustworthy sources. Then use those trustworthy sources for your research. 

A few miscellaneous cautions as you venture out:

• Don’t be tricked into thinking that because a site contains a LOT of information that the information is necessarily good. 
• Bias ≠ agenda. Everyone has a bias, which is just how they see things; an agenda is what they are trying to DO (like push a particular narrative).
• Don’t always take the top hit from your search results. Skim the list of results and choose one from a trustworthy site, if possible. 
• Be aware that AI will make up fake citations and sources for its information if you ask it to cite its sources. When in doubt, google the citation to see if it’s legit.