Evaluate Your Sources  

Book reviews are a good way to find more information about the book(s) you are evaluating.  Use this guide to help you find book reviews.

For more information on what questions you should ask yourself when evaluating print resources, see the questions in the "Initial Analysis" and "Content Analysis" boxes to the right. 

Finding out whether your article/publication is peer reviewed is a good step in gathering evidence to evaluate your article.  To learn more about finding out about peer review, go here. 

For more information on what questions you should ask yourself when evaluating print resources, see the questions in the "Initial Analysis" and "Content Analysis" boxes to the right. 

The below questions are ones that you should ask yourself when evaluating printed material.  These questions can often be answered by examining the basic information about the book: Author, Publisher, Publication Date.  After you answer these questions, move to analyzing the content of the item at hand (book or article).

Authority

• Who published this material?
• What are the author's qualifications?
  • Is this someone in your field of study with a Ph.D.?
  • What other research has this person done?
  • What is this person's reputation?
  • Has your professor mentioned this person in class before or his he/she listed in your textbook or readings?

Currency

• When was this material published?
• Is the information new or is it dated?
  • If information is dated, does that make it less valuable or is it a seminal study that continues to be useful many years after publication?
  • If information is new, have other scholars writing about the same topic come to the same conclusion and/or have the results of the study been reproduced elsewhere by other scholars?

Publisher

• Who published this material? 
  
  • If it is from a university press it is probably scholarly in nature. 
• Does the publisher of the material have an ideological bent and/or do they publish certain types of materials?

After having covered the initial analysis, read the preface to determine the author's intentions for the book.  In the case of an article, read the abstract.   Scan the table of contents (for books, journals & magazines) and the index to get a broad overview of the material it covers. Note whether bibliographies are included. Read the chapters that specifically address your topic.  The presence and quality of a bibliography at the end of the book or article may reflect the care with which the authors have prepared their work.

Accuracy

• Can you verify the accuracy of the information?
• Is information cited properly?
• Is the information written well?  i.e., spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc.

Coverage

• Is the information presented in a manner that makes it easy to use?
• Is it a primary source or a secondary source? (see here for more information)
• How thoroughly is the subject covered?
• Is an overview or is it a narrowly focused research paper and/or book?
  • If it is an overview, is the topic coverd too broadly? 
  • If it is narrow in focus, does it skip over information that may be of use to you that you will have to find elsewhere?

Purpose

• What is the purpose of this book?
  • Is it to inform, explain, persuade, or sell a product?
• Is the information intended for a specific audience (high school students, scholars, etc.)?
  • Is the intended audience useful/appropriate for your research?
• Is information presented objectively or does it have a bias?
  • If it has a bias (e.g., a specific political or philosophical point of view) does that detract from the usefulness to you?

Evaluation

• How has the book been evaluated or reviewed?  Have reviews of it been favorable?  (See here for more information on finding book reviews)
• If it is from a journal, is this a scholarly or peer reviewed journal article? 
  
  • Scholarly journal articles often go through a blind review process in which the article is evaluated before it is accepted for inclusion into the journal.  See here for more information on the peer review process.

Permission has been granted to adapt some of the information used on this page.  See below for authority:
Olin Library Reference
Research & Learning Services
Cornell University Library
Ithaca, NY, USA