Evaluating your sources — podcast
In this podcast and activity, you will learn how to question your sources.
Introduction
Evaluating your sources is all about asking questions. Listen to this podcast on evaluating your sources. There is an activity at the end which will give you an opportunity to add your own questions to the discussion board and read and comment on the questions others have posed.
Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael, a Teaching and Learning Librarian at the University of Manchester Library. In this podcast, I’ll be talking about evaluating your sources.
As a librarian, I like to think that there’s no such thing as a bad source: it’s what you do with it that matters! I wouldn’t use a statement from a tabloid newspaper to support the central argument in my dissertation but I might use it to demonstrate the public interest in the topic I’m talking about.
To use information effectively, we need a way to analyse it. A great way to do this is by asking questions.
Some of the questions I might ask are: what is the purpose of the source and why was it created? Is it trying to inform you of a fact or persuade you of a viewpoint? Can you detect any bias? This might be from what the author includes or from what has been left out! What about the organisation that has published the source? What do you know about them? This can be particularly important for non-scholarly sources such as reports. When was it published and are the facts and ideas presented still relevant?
We have barely scratched the surface here and there are likely very specific questions that you will want to ask of particular sources that are related to your subject. You can find out more in our ‘Finding the good stuff’ online resource embedded below this podcast. You’ll also find out more by discussing your sources with course mates, tutors and colleagues. Discussing these questions with them can help you discover even more about the sources you are using.
The ability to critically evaluate information is essential for your studies and you will often find mention of it on your assignment mark schemes. It’s also a skill that we use in our every day lives. We interact with information when watching the news, in discussions with friends and making decisions. Let’s use an example that will be familiar to most of us: buying stuff online.
Activity: In this activity, we will look at a news article and I will ask you to think of some questions you might ask when evaluating the article. Please post some of your questions in the discussion board.
In January 2019, the product-testing, consumer-championing, review-publishing website Which? reported on a slew of fake 5 star reviews for products listed on Amazon. You can find the article in the links below this podcast. Pause this podcast and read the article.
Which? described suspicious behaviour on reviews for a particular phone charger. Reviews were posted in batches of 350 or so and many were copied from the reviews of other chargers for sale on Amazon.
As consumers, many of us use the customer reviews to inform our purchases and fake reviews obviously erode our trust. What questions would you ask about this article? Add your questions to your Blackboard discussion and read what others have posted. I’ll volunteer some of my thoughts when you return to this podcast. Pause this podcast and post your questions in the discussion board.
The first thing I asked myself is about the source itself: ‘what do I know about the people who published the article?’ I’m old enough to remember the printed version of Which? and that it was a trusted source when my mum and dad bought a washing machine! So I know who published it and what they do. I knew that you had to buy the magazine and now subscribe to their reviews website. I know that ‘trusted reviews’ is how they make their money, so I know why the article was published, which led me to thinking that it is in Which?’s interest if consumer-generated reviews on Amazon cannot be trusted! Call me cynical!
I know this is a news article so I’m not expecting it to present its evidence in the same way as a journal article. I can see some mention of the research methods but not enough to replicate the research if I was so inclined. I guess the question is ‘do I believe Which?’s claim of there being thousands of fake Amazon reviews?’ On balance, I would say ‘yes, I do’. However, if my thesis was ‘you can’t trust Amazon reviews’, I would want to find other sources which corroborate this argument.
By asking questions and articulating our responses to the answers to those questions in our assignments, we demonstrate an understanding of the limits of our sources. We can see from this example that, in critically evaluating our source, we often don’t reach a simple conclusion. It can prompt us to look for further evidence or even conflicting view points - all of which makes for better, more critical assignments and a deeper understanding of your topic. I hope that you enjoyed this podcast and thinking critically about sources. Check out the links below for further information on being critical and My Learning Essentials.
Which? article:
You can find out more about being critical in your thinking, reading and writing by using the resources in the further support section below.
