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FSYM 101: First-Year Symposium: Tracing Your Community
This resource has been designed to support you through completion of the Tracing Your Community Paper assigned in several sections of FSYM 101. Assignment instructions and expectations will be set by the instructor.
Evaluating resources (especially those found online) is not as straightforward as completing a checklist of tasks.
Source evaluation requires critical thinking and close engagement with the materials.
Considerations include:
- Authority of author/publishing entity
- Publication date (current information)
- Evidence (especially the same information presented across multiple sources)
- Intended audience
- Source type
- Relevance to research project
First Year Symposium Library Orientation: Major Takeaway
What is the context of the research assignment?
- You must determine the context of an assignment before you will be able to effectively decide what makes a "good" or "bad" source for it.
- The concepts that we covered are important to know because there is no one singular checklist that can be used to complete all source evaluations.
- The questions that were provided as examples throughout the tutorial activity were not an exhaustive list of questions for a researcher to ask.
- Not all the questions presented in the activity as examples will be helpful to ask in the instance of every source evaluation.
- While the SIFT method is not the only strategy that a researcher can use to verify information, it is a very helpful option for evaluating a source and is demonstrated here by librarians from Vanderbilt University.
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