In general, you can trust books you find on the library’s shelves. Librarians have carefully reviewed the materials and selected them based on their academic merit. However, you still need to ask yourself some questions before selecting a book:
Who is the author? What is their purpose? Does the author aim to inform, persuade, or entertain? For example, does the author have a political agenda?
Check the publication date. Though librarians try to keep outdated books off the shelves they may slip through the cracks. If you’re a nursing student writing a research paper on arthritis, you probably don’t want to use a book published in 1960. If you need help evaluating a resource just ask a librarian.
You can locate books by searching the online catalog.
If your instructor asks you to use scholarly or peer-reviewed articles for your research, you need to use academic journals. Scholarly journals are written by experts for experts. For this reason, the language in journals is often full of technical vocabulary and jargon. For more information on the difference between scholarly and popular resources watch the video in the box below.
Journals often contain no pictures and few advertisements, as opposed to glossy magazines, which are full of advertisements and photographs.
The best place to locate scholarly journals is in the Nashville State Mayfield Library databases.
Magazines include popular titles like Time, Vanity Fair, and Sports Illustrated, as well as more obscure titles that you may not be familiar with. They’re generally easier to understand than scholarly journals; however, magazine articles do not undergo peer-review. Magazine writers are not required to give credentials or provide a works cited page; however, magazine articles do go through an editorial process where facts are checked and articles are proofed for errors. Popular magazines are more likely to contain opinions and personal narrative. However, depending on your research topic, they can be great sources of information.
Print magazines may be identified by their glossy, colorful covers, as opposed to scholarly journals' more subdued covers. The relevance of a magazine to your research can vary dramatically based on the publication. For instance, if you were writing a paper on the economy, which magazine would make a better source: Time or People? Use the comment feature below to discuss your ideas.
Websites -- even more so than other types of information -- need to be thoroughly evaluated before they are used in research. Sure, it's easy to find information on Google, but it's also easy to find bad information.
As a general rule of thumb, .edu's and .gov's are the most reliable sources of information on the web; however, there are lots of great .com's, .orgs, etc. When evaluating websites you want to consider whether the website provider has a vested in interest in promoting one side of an issue. For example, if you are writing a paper on the health benefits of coffee, you probably don't want to use an article funded by Starbucks.
The video below further explains how to evaluate websites.
Primary Sources are documents written during the time you're researching. They may include historic documents, newspaper articles, court cases, letters, novels, poetry, etc. Secondary Sources are written about primary sources. More information on primary vs. secondary sources.