LIB 1010 Module 5

Evaluating Sources and Searching the Internet

Important Factors No matter the format, to be useful an information

source must have two things:

1. It must be relevant to your topic and purpose

2. It must have the appropriate degree of credibility required for your audience

Scholarly work, including entry level undergraduate college assignments, require reputable, scholarly sources.

How do you determine relevance?

Relevance The item should be “about” your topic, not just

mention your topic in passing

Subject terms can help determine the topic

Read abstract or summary

Length: is there enough information to make the source useful?

Needs to be “about” your topic in an appropriate format, by a credible author, with suitable sourcing

Currency

Is currency important?

Needed in some disciplines (sciences, social sciences)

Need for some projects

Check date published or revised

Sometimes a standard work is required no matter when it was published

Format Published or not?

Published means available in an unchanging form

Books, periodicals

Some web sites

Even some published material is less useful

Letters to the editor are of limited value except as an expression of one individual’s opinion

Evaluation Concerned with the content of the information

source leading to a judgment of the worthiness

All sources must be carefully scrutinized, but some bear more careful examination

Wikis

Blogs

Personal web sites

Must be credible, valid, and reliable

CARS (adapted from Robert Harris, Virtual Salt)

A checklist for evaluating sources

Credible

Accurate

Reasonable

Supported

Credible Trustworthy source (peer-reviewed?)

Author’s credentials (not anonymous; education and affiliations)

Evidence of quality control (not simply copied from somewhere, good production values)

Known or respected authority

Organizational support (professional associations, universities)

Goal: An authoritative source that shows evidence of being trustworthy and truthful.

Accurate Up-to-date (must supply date of publication or revision)

Fact-based (as opposed to opinion-based; no vague language or sweeping generalizations)

Detailed and exact

Comprehensive (doesn’t leave out important info; isn’t one sided)

Appropriate audience and purpose (scholarly!)

Goal: A source that is correct today focused on showing the entire truth

Reasonable Fair, balanced, objective, reasoned

(objectivity)

No conflict of interest

Fact-based (not opinion-based)

Absence of logical fallacies

Unbiased tone (moderateness, “black or white” thinking)

Goal: a source that engages the topic thoughtfully and reasonably with an emphasis on truth finding

Supported Sources listed (bibliography)

Corroboration available (substantiated)

Claims are backed up with evidence (research, not supposition)

Documentation is supplied

Goal: a source that provides convincing evidence for the claims made and also can be triangulated (two other credible sources support the findings)

AuthoritativeWeb sites

Contain

Author

If no author is listed, is there a reputable organizational sponsor (Federal government, etc.)?

Name; title, education, or position; organizational affiliations; contact information

Currency

If currency is not important, is there a date given for page creation or revision?

Access vs. Skills According to Pew Internet project, May 2010

79% of Americans use the Internet daily

Study published in Journal of Marketing (2004), “Beyond Adoption: Development and Application of a Use-Diffusion Model,” by Shih and Venkatesh

30% Internet users are tech-savvy

The truth? Only 22% of Americans actually know how to effectively use the Internet

Accessing the Internet Web browsers are software programs that send

requests to web servers and allow users to view and access information

Web Browsers

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Mozilla Firefox

Google Chrome

Apple Safari

Browser Connections Web browsers (client) send requests for each

element on a web page (images, tables, text, etc.) housed on a server

Each connection between a client and server fulfills only one request.

A new connection must be made for each HTTP request, even if the elements are housed on a single web page

URLs Uniform Resource Locator

Address of a webpage

http://www.dixie.edu http:// (HyperText Transfer Protocol – the “language” of the

item)

www (not all web sites include www, some work with or without)

.dixie (domain)

.edu (domain extension)

Domain Extensions .edu = educational institution, college, university, or

research organization with a bona fide U.S. presence

.com = a commercial or business enterprise, supposedly with a U.S. presence (most common domain extension)

.gov = U.S. government entity, largely federal level

.mil = U.S. military entity

.net = an business entity focused on the Internet (second most common domain extension)

.org = a not-for-profit entity (including churches, K-12 schools, charities, political groups, etc.)

Searching the Internet Search engines are software programs that build huge

databases of web content (pages) and enable users to search those databases using keywords

Search Engines (general)

Google

Yahoo! Search

Bing

Wolfram Alpha (numbers)

Cuil (cool)

Specialized search engines

Search Engines Spider

Crawls, linking between web sites

Collects information (URLs, indexing content)

Creates huge database

When you search Google (or any other search engine) you are actually not searching the “web”

You are searching that spider’s representation of the web

Search Engines Different search engines produce very different results even when

using the same search terms

Different spiders create different databases

Databases differ in size

Different indexing protocols

Updating schedules vary

No search engine spider accesses all of the web

Invisible web, hidden web

Part of the web that cannot be accessed by search engines

Bank records, medical records, Department of defense secrets, etc.

Includes many library databases (not accessible through search engines)

Search Engine Results Differences

Which results are found

How results are ranked

Ranking based on individual algorithms

Secret – but experts guess

Page popularity (number of pages linking to it)

“Fuzzy and” (documents with all terms are ranked first, followed by documents containing some terms or one term)

Importance (web site traffic and quality of links)

Recent years, geographical location and individual’s previous searches

Results Ranking Usefulness and efficiency depends on individual

preferences and search terms

Don’t be afraid to use more than one search engine, just as you might use more than one library database

Look beyond first 10 results (default display)

Use advanced searching techniques

Searching Default search

Search engines automatically insert “and” between search terms

nuclear waste storage = nuclear and waste and storage

Words not searched together impacts meaning

Use “phrase searching”

Putting search phrases (more than one word that should be searched together) in quotation marks forces the phrase to be searched together

“nuclear waste” storage = nuclear waste and storage

Unneeded words Eliminate unneeded and/or common words

Articles (a, an, the)

Interrogatives (who, what, where, when, how)

Prepositions (in, for, at, etc.)

Punctuation is ignored except

Apostrophe (hadn’t, didn’t)

Dollar sign to indicate prices (nikon 400 vs. nikon $400)

Hyphen (full-text) (read as minus sign if preceded by a space)

Underscore (quick_sort)

Don’t search: what is the truth about global warming?

Do search: truth global warming

Other Search Tricks

Capitalization doesn’t matter

Utah = uTaH = utah

Eliminate unwanted terms

Use “minus” sign

“nuclear waste” storage –medical

Removes the result if the term medical appears

Word Variations Google automatically stems words:

A search for run will also return

runs

running

runner

If you want to stop Google from stemming, use the plus ( + ) sign in front of the word

+run

Search synonyms

~car

car, cars, automobiles, vehicles, etc.

Advanced Search

Eliminate unwanted words, or can use minus sign ( - )

Increase results per page

Search within a site or domain

Example: dixie.edu or .gov

Limit results by date published or updated

Limit where keywords are located (in title, in URL)

Limit by language or region

Find similar results

define:

Google scholar http://scholar.google.com

More Googling iGoogle (can customize

search preferences)

Google news

Google images

Google videos

Google blog search

Google earth

Google product search

Google maps

Google finance

Google books

Google Goog 411

Google docs

Word processor

Presentation software

Spreadsheet program

Blogger

Ready for Quiz 5 You’re now ready to take Quiz 5.

It’s located in Module 5. Although the quiz is open book, remember that the Final Exam is not, so you’ll need to actually be learning the content not just filling in the bubbles.

If you have any questions or run into any problems, please let us know.

This class is much easier for students who work quickly through the modules. Don’t be afraid to work ahead and get the entire class done!