It is essential that we practice verifying that our sources are credible, reliable, and authoritative. One way for us to remember the questions we need to ask is the acronym, CRAAP. CRAAP stands for:
The following list will assist you in developing a strategy for critically evaluating sources:
CURRENCY - The timeliness of the information
RELEVANCY - The importance of the information for your needs
AUTHORITY - The source of the information
ACCURACY - The reliability, truthfulness and correctness of the content
PURPOSE - The reason the information exists
A Google search can be helpful in the preliminary stages of research, especially now that more quality content has been made publicly accessible on the web; a publicly accessible resource means you will not be charged an additional fee to access the content. While access to credible content on the web has increased so has the amount of unreliable, malicious, and undocumented content. All of us know that anyone can post or upload content on the web. As researchers we have to remain critical to determine the authority, credibility, and quality of the content.
A big difference between the content you'll find searching in the library's databases and catalog (locating articles and books) and searching using Google is that the majority of the content found through the library's research tools have been reviewed and edited. These resources had to follow a set standard of guidelines determined by the experts in that discipline and/or by the publisher. The content you find through the Internet does not necessarily have a standard of publishing guidelines, so there may be no one vetting the information for accuracy and credibility; a standard of publishing content on the Internet is determined by the organization or by the discipline. Develop a habit of evaluating each website you visit. The criteria list above can be also be applied to the web, but here's a short list of questions for you to consider: