ELISE for Postgraduate Students - Enabling Library Information Skills for Everyone

Assessing the importance and relevance of information

It is highly probable that your research will find far more information than you can include in your assignment and more articles than you can read in the time available. During the search process you may have already discarded sources that you thought were not relevant and, of the ones you have kept, have a ‘feel’ for those which are most relevant to your assignment.

This module will help you critically examine your sources at a more sophisticated level. This is a very individual task. There may be more than one way of interpreting an assignment question and the relevance of sources used will depend on the interpretation chosen.

Therefore your first task is to go back to the assignment question. You looked at the question closely in Modules 1 and 2 when you were choosing key words and devising a search strategy. Now you need to reconsider your choices:

• Has your research suggested some better search terms?
• Has your research led you to other sources of information which now need to be investigated?
• If you now think that you will focus on a few aspects of the topic, do you have the right balance of material?
• Do you believe that the sources you have gathered will provide evidence for a well supported argument which addresses the assignment question?

Define and apply criteria for evaluating information

One of the better known standards for evaluating information is the ‘CRAAP’ test:

Currency

The timeliness of the information

Relevance

The importance of the information for your needs

Authority

The source of the information

Accuracy

The reliability, truthfulness, and correctness of the informational content

Purpose

The reason the information exists

(Taken from the website of the Meriam Library, California State University )
‘CRAAP’ was originally designed as a tool for evaluating websites but it could equally well be used for other sources of information.

This is just one set of criteria and there are many others. For another good example, go to the UNSW Learning Centre’s Selecting Information. It covers the same criteria as the CRAAP test but it is particularly good at relating the criteria directly to how you will construct your assignment.

Select the most appropriate sources

Now that you have found the most relevant sources and critically evaluated them, which ones will be the foundations of your assignment?

• Do you have the appropriate mix of publication types (scholarly, professional, government etc)? - Check Module 1 for guidance
• Do your selected sources support your arguments and the focus that you have chosen?
• Do you have some sources that present an opposite view – and can you challenge it?
• And, finally, do you have all the credible evidence you need to support your overall arguments?

Worked example

Here is the question that we are using:

Many assignment questions at postgraduate level are imprecise which means that there is not one right answer but many paths leading to a variety of acceptable answers (one of the key outcomes of university study is the ability of the student to structure an unstructured problem and present it in a logical and coherent manner). Therefore, developing a solid argument (backed up by good evidence), which clearly addresses the question, is critical.

As Module 4 deals with critically evaluating information it is not possible to provide one right answer or correct procedure. This is the point where you must use your independent judgment. The following questions, using the CRAAP test, will help you through the process of critically evaluating sources.

In Module 2 we found a book and an article relating to our question.

Book example:

Journal article example:

Questions to consider when evaluating sources

Currency - The book was published in 1994, the article in June 2005. Your question asked you to explain what happened in ‘recent years’. How did you define ‘recent years’? Is 1994 recent? The results of a database search are usually displayed in reverse chronological order, did you use this feature to find the 2005 article?

Authority - From your professional experience, do you recognise the authors' names? Have you read other articles or books by these authors and found them useful? Is the book, article, author or journal referred to by your lecturer in the course notes or in the recommended text book? Does the journal article cite a lot of the other articles that you have used? It may be too soon for the article to be cited in other articles but for a 1994 book you could check if it has been cited and reviewed. Seminal works on a topic will be cited frequently in the literature; a database called Web of Science can help you to establish which ones they are. The article above is published in the ‘Journal of Applied Psychology’, which is a refereed journal published by the American Psychological Association, which is an authoritative source and therefore suitable for academic work.

Accuracy - Can you vouch from your own experience for the accuracy of some of the statements in the book or article? Are statistics used in a professional manner? Do other items on your reading list make contrary statements or directly criticise these works?

Purpose - Was the book/article written to promote a particular point of view? The introduction of a book will often tell you the author's purpose in writing it. Can you see any indications of bias in the article? Does this affect the relevance of the article to you?

Practice activity

Choose an article or a web site from your course materials and apply the CRAAP test to it. Do you understand why your lecturer included this article or web site?

If you do not have a course list, choose any web site or article that is relevant to your course and evaluate it using the CRAAP test. Were you surprised at the results?

We cannot help you with this exercise because your choice is so wide. If you cannot evaluate it, if you cannot establish the Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy and Purpose of the article or web site, ask yourself if you should be using this material.