Questions to Ask About All Sources

Before you rely on the expertise offered by an author, you should consider the author's credentials. What is the author's academic or institutional affiliation? Has the author published other books or articles on the subject? This information is readily available on the "about the author" page of most books, and generally can be found accompanying the author's name in journal articles. When using an electronic database to locate journal articles, you should be able to identify the author of a journal article in the citation record. The author's institutional affiliation will often be listed in the citation record as well. If there isn't any information about the author in the citation record, you can usually find it by looking at the journal article itself. Finding information about an author published on a website can be more difficult (see Evaluating Web Sources), so you should be very careful about using websites if you can't locate any information about the author.

Before you rely on a source, you should always try to figure out why the source was written and for whom the source is intended. For example, is the author an academic who is engaging in a particular scholarly conversation? Does the author cite other major works or data about the topic, or is this a personal response to an issue or text? Does the author have some kind of financial stake in expressing a particular point of view? Does the author work for an organization with a known viewpoint on the issues discussed in the source? It's important to make sure that you ask these questions so that you'll know whether a source is useful to consult. For example, a summary of an issue written by an author who works for an organization with a known political viewpoint on that issue might be quite different from a summary of that issue published by an academic who researches the issue.

As you consider a source, try to determine what it covers and in what depth. Does the source make an argument relevant to your topic? Does it respond to arguments made by other scholars? Does it lay out background information relevant to your topic? Does it summarize other research on your topic? If you wanted to gain background information on this topic, would looking at this article be enough, or would you need to consult other sources?

For more information about the scope and goals of a source, you can often consult an article's abstract—a short summary of the article's main ideas—or a book's introduction to get a sense of how it might be useful to you in your research.

Is the publication a peer-reviewed journal? Is it published by an organization with a known viewpoint or financial stake in an issue? Articles and books published by organizations with political affiliations or financial interests may be useful to you as you learn about a topic, but you should be aware of how these affiliations and interests might shape the data or arguments in the source.

If you are using a source from social media—a TikTok or YouTube video, a Tweet, or another social media post—it’s important to make sure you understand who has created the post, what sources they cite in the post, and what the purpose of the post is before you assume it is a reliable source for your paper. While some online content creators do rigorous research, many do not.