Robbins Library Notes

This post more for neophyte researchers, though advanced researchers may find it of use as well.

The critical evaluation of resources is an important research skill to develop. For every decent resource, there are often ten or more poor ones. Here are some tricks that can help you separate the wheat out from the chaff.

Nonetheless, these aren’t foolproof, and every researcher should keep the phrase, Caveat emptor, in mind. You should be just as critical at evaluating resources when researching as you are when reading texts or writing papers or books.

Check Prefaces, Introductions, Indexes, Bibliographies, Footnotes

Prefaces, introductions, indexes, bibliographies, and footnotes are often excellent sources of information for useful research and subject experts. You can find articles, books, scholars, concepts, ideas, and more within these places. One thing I have learned in my researching career — never underestimate the power of the serendipitous find. I have had several instances where an odd comment or reference in an introduction or a footnote has led me to the information I may have been searching (literally) months to find.

For example, if I were doing research on Kant, and was looking at the second edition of Henry Allison’s Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, I would be paying very close attention to the people whom Allison cites or references, given Allison’s prominence.

Another thing to pay attention to are the people whom the author thanks in the preface or introduction, or at the bottom of the title page of an article. Often, these are scholars working in similar areas of study, and whose work may be potentially of use for your own research.

Finally, check out how many times an article, chapter, book, etc. has been cited, using a citation database like Arts & Humanities Citation Index. You can get a sense for the importance of an article by the number of times it has been cited — though do not completely discount an item simply because it hasn’t been cited yet.

Consult an Expert

Don’t be afraid to ask subject experts (e.g., your professor, your librarian) about good sources and prominent scholars. We can usually direct you to the better resources right away, or direct you to someone who does know.

Or, broadening the definition of “expert” out, what resources are listed in the bibliography of an encyclopedia article, or an introductory text? These “experts” can often tell you quickly where and what materials you should be looking at.

Domain names

Not all Web sites are created equal. Certain domain names are often sources of better quality information than others, thought most of these gradations in quality are subjective and informal at present. A .com address, for example, is usually a commercial business establishment, whose information may be skewed or biased to promote a product, though not always. A .edu address is an academic institution, whose information is generally of better quality, though not necessarily. In short, it pays to have some sense of the purpose of the Web site you’re looking at, in order to evaluate it. And, some domain names are better for answering questions than others. If you’re looking for government statistics on population demographics, for example, a .gov domain is best — in this case, likely the US Census Bureau. For business information, you may indeed want a .com domain.

There are many domain names out there — the official guide to Internet domain names can be found here.

Old vs. New

This is a tricky standard to apply. Age and novelty must be applied in conjunction with a host of other factors when deciding on the quality of a resource. Simply because something is “old” or “new” does change the value of a resource. On the one hand, today’s pet theory or fact is tomorrow’s phlogiston. On the other hand, what is old is not necessarily better — some views do not age well over time.

For example — St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentaries on Aristotle are still read today, nearly 800 years after his death, as valuable commentaries on Aristotle, as well as works of philosophy in their own right. Other figures, whose work was once influential and prominent in academic circles a little more than a century ago, are no longer highly regarded.

So, my caution is to not merely dismiss something because it is old or new, nor to embrace it simply because it is old or new.

Online vs. Print

Again, like Old vs. New, this is a tricky category. No matter what the Internet Utopians say, not everything of value is online, and merely because something is online doesn’t make it better (or worse) than a print source. Nor is the electronic world something one has to fear — it will not destroy print media, but offer, instead, new and different ways to access research.

Some sources exist only in print. Others are available only in print at Harvard (e.g., The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy) because their annual cost is prohibitively expensive. Some exist only online. Thus to cover all of the bases, it makes sense to use both print and online resources when doing research, not given precedence to one over the other.

There are a few things to keep in mind when evaluating online resources, especially Web sites.

• Domain Names — I’ve listed some information above about domain names.
• Last update — Does the site or database list when it was last updated? This is a good way to check for the currency of the information that is housed on the site or in the database.
• Anonymous vs. signed sites — For Web sites, check to see if their is a site owner listed, along with contact information. It is too easy to hide on the Internet, and an unsigned site, with no contact information, should be raising all sorts of red flags.
• Can the information be verified elsewhere? – It seems obvious, but it’s a good habit to see if the information that you find in a database or on a Web site can be verified elsewhere. It’s very easy to do an online search on Google, take the information from the first hit, use it in a paper, and move on, without stopping to confirm that the information is correct. Taking a few minutes to check your research will save you embarrassment later on.

Quality

Obviously, quality is a vague and somewhat subjective noun. Yet, after speaking with experts, and weighing the other criteria I’ve outlined above, you will begin to get a better sense of what resources are better than others. You can also judge quality by the clarity of the resource, if it has references and a bibliography, what is in the bibliography, who the author is, and so on.

Quality becomes an important factor when looking at material from resources like Wikipedia. There have been a lot of questions raised about the quality and accuracy of Wikipedia entries over the last several years. Does this mean that you should avoid Wikipedia? Not at all. Nonetheless, careful researchers should take its entries cum grano salis (with a grain of salt), and make sure that they can verify the information elsewhere.

Verifiability

As I’ve stated several times in this post: can you verify the information that you find in one source with another source or other sources? Make sure that the seeming nugget of gold that you’ve stumbled over in the stream bed isn’t, in reality, a lump of iron pyrite.

Summary

When evaluating research resources, make sure to be as critical as you would be when evaluating a text or an argument. By following these steps regularly, you’ll begin to separate out the wheat from the chaff, the gold from the iron pyrite, making your research all the more effective.