Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Evaluation is done in context, each time you use a source. Evaluation depends on what you need. A peer-reviewed scholarly article that's full of data and jargon, for example, might be ideal for a research paper but useless for a review. There is a lot of information out there and the CRAAP Test is one way to evaluate the information you find.
Currency: Does the age of your research matter?
Relevance: How well does the research apply to your topic?
Authority: Do you trust the person(s) who produced the research?
Accuracy: As far as you can tell, is the research correct?
Purpose: Why, do you think, the research was produced?
All five of these are not always as important as the rest. It will depend on what you're working on. So, for today, we're going to focus on Authority.
Authority is troublesome because you don’t always know who wrote or produced the information. Are you looking at a personal website, a corporate site, or an academic site? Is the author associated with an organization you trust for the kind of information you’re looking for? Let's look at an example:
A little bit about the Times:
Assuming you need a scholarly article on the topic of object permanence.
Journal article: Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy
Assuming you need information about beef nutrition.
Website: http://beefnutrition.org/
