Dissertations: the Science model
You can play safe and use a pre-evaluated ‘subject gateway’ where human experts have searched the web for high-quality, reliable information. Ask your Brookes subject librarian, or try one of these:
- Intute (www.intute.ac.uk/)
- PINAKES (www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html)
But at the end of the day, it’s up to you to be confident about how good your web source is – or isn’t.
There is lots of good advice (on the web of course!) about how to adopt a consistent questioning approach to stuff you find. Here are two straightforward sets of questions you could start with:
- kathyschrock.net/abceval/5ws.pdf
This takes the core questions 'Who? What? When? Where? Why? as the basis of an evaluation. A good place to start. - liblearn.osu.edu/tutor/les1/
This website has nice clean appearance with the basic questions all on one page, with lots more detail behind if you want it.
The Brookes library guide Evaluating web sources also suggests a simple model for checklisting the reliability of what you are reading: /library/guides/evalweb2007.doc
