Today, I learned that the author of a source is just as important as the source you are using. If the author’s credentials aren’t up to par, he/she may not not be a credible enough source to cite when doing research. Another thing that I learned about today was how to assess the credentials of authors to determine how reliable the author might be. Things, such as their work history and publications, are good indicators to how credible they might be. Something else that I learned today was how a search engine sorts the results. The more a link is cited, the higher it would appear in a search.
One thing I’m a little skeptical about is whether we learned accurate tests of determining the most reliable and scholarly sources. What if someone published an article that introduced some very interesting topics, but he didn’t cite any scholarly peer-reviewed sources? Would his work be any less valuable, even though his information is just as valid, as someone whose work is peer reviewed and written using scholarly sources?
Omar, you’re right to be skeptical. We haven’t finished yet our discussion of what makes a source reliable or scholarly. Your question is a good one, too. I think we have to distinguish between the way we evaluate sources for different needs. When you are doing your own writing and you need to find sources that you can use in your paper, article, book, etc. you are going to have a set of criteria to evaluate what to use and what to leave out. On the other hand, if you are just reading something for its own sake and have no need to incorporate it into your own writing, then the criteria about what makes it valuable may not be the same as those you use when writing.
For our class, I’m not trying to convey a universal hierarchy of sources that identifies which are the most valuable and which are the least. Instead, I’m hoping that our class will learn how different kinds of sources can do different kinds of things when deployed throughout your own papers you write. That source you mention that doesn’t have any peer-review sources cited in it might in certain situations be perfectly acceptable and effective as a source in my own writing.
I do think, though, that our class needs to have more discussion about why it can useful and sometimes necessary to cite scholarly sources. In the next week, we are going to discuss in depth how you use sources in your own writing and the ways that they can advance and deepen an argument you want to make.