The best way to learn how to evaluate and select sources is to apply important standards or criteria to each source. Each source you use should measure up as useful, timely, appropriate, and authoritative.

Useful or Relevant

Your first criterion will probably be whether the source is useful or relevant to your focused topic. That is, a source must be about your topic, and must be able to tell you something new about it. Besides the title of the source, you can also look at the subject headings, table of contents, index, and introduction to judge usefulness.

Timely

You should remain aware of the date that a source is published. Most professors like to see you use current or recently published materials, and start to wonder (and lower your grade) if all your sources are several years old. Depending on the subject matter, you can use older materials if you also show an awareness of the most current publications. Sometimes an historical treatment will require the use of older sources.

Appropriate

Not every source is going to be appropriate for college work. Material written for children, for instance, should be used only in very special situations, such as examples in an education course. Sources aimed at general adult readers are adequate for some college level work.

But the most appropriate sources are likely to be materials aimed at researchers and scholars in a particular subject area. Your professor will call these materials the scholarly or research literature of that discipline. As you take classes and declare a major in college, you are becoming part of a specific audience and learning how to use the research literature for particular disciplines as appropriate sources. The overall tone and style of writing will reflect the needs of a specialized audience, and scholarly material will definitely have footnotes, references and bibliographies.

Authoritative

When your professor is grading your paper, he or she will have one main question for you:

How did you know that?

And of course your answer will be, "I read it." And you will give that answer by citing your source for the information. But your answer is only as good as the source that you cite.

In other words, you must be sure you are using authoritative sources, whose authors can answer that same question, "How do you know that?" You will be able to get the answer by considering the author's methodology, and expertise.

Methodology. The author should identify their sources, and describe the research that went into the making of the book.

Expertise. Many sources will have brief information about the author, which should indicate any education or experience that relates to the subject, or any academic affiliation.

More on Scholarly and Research Publications

You can pre-select for appropriate and authoritative materials to some degree when selecting a database. The Penfield Library catalog includes books that have been screened and specifically chosen in part for how appropriate and authoritative the item is. General periodical indexes (Readers' Guide Abstracts and InfoTrac OneFile) include mostly popular and professional magazines. Subject specialized indexes include research and scholarly journals.