2.3 Evaluating Sources

First, make sure what you’ve found is peer reviewed. If you’ve found a report or a popular press article (something like Time Magazine), hang onto it if you think it provides helpful contextual background but it should not be part of your literature search. If you’ve identified a dissertation or a thesis that seems helpful, there are typically two things worth doing: (1) check to see if it has been published as an article or a book (sometimes you’ll have to check out the author’s CV if you can find it), and (2) use it to identify other peer reviewed materials.

Science Magazine has a great article that describes how different academics read articles. If you look through their responses, you’ll notice that few take a new article, read the abstract than read through the article cover to cover. Instead there are a variety of approaches to finding out the “meat” of the article quickly, without reading it in its entirety. Use this as a strategy for figuring out whether or not an article is a good fit for your project.

Read the abstract, introduction, and discussion/conclusion sections to get a sense of the paper. Ask yourself if it makes a contribution to what you are researching. If it does, add it to your spreadsheet and fill out the necessary details. If it does not, add it to the “discard” list so you can find it later if you change your mind (or if you forget whether you’ve read it or not!). You can find some more details on the “AIC” technique for reading on Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s website. He also has a reading strategies.

If the article does fit into your research, take some basic synthetic notes about the article. These will form the basis of your paragraphs for each source in the annotated bibliography.