With the high volume of information available to you online when you begin your research, it can be difficult to know which of the sources you find to actually use in your assignments or essays. Ultimately, you’ll want to choose the information that is of good quality and that can help you to answer your research questions most effectively. This means you need to make some critical decisions about the information you have found. Even if the materials you find are from reliable sources, such as Library Search or a Subject Database like Scopus you’ll need to consider how the information you’ve found compares to other information and if it is suitable for your purposes.
To help you make effective critical decisions you’ll need to think about these key areas:
Currency – is the information up-to-date?
Relevance – does it help you answer your research question?
Authority – who wrote it? How qualified are the authors?
Accuracy – how did the authors of the information reach their conclusions? What evidence and data have they used?
Purpose – Why was it written?
The video below looks at these in more detail:
See our Evaluating Information guide for more advice on selecting suitable information for your assignments and for more on the ins and outs of critical thinking take a look at this great blog from the Writing Development Centre: Shopping Around for a Critical Opinion