Today, we covered how to evaluate the quality of our sources and, more directly, the authors of them. I had known before that not every author could be trusted to cite in an academic paper, but before, I had only known ways of weeding out the most obvious examples of untrustworthy authors. However, I learned a few new techniques for determining which authors are reliable and which are not, past making a general assumption about them based on whether or not a civil war author has pictures of himself in a civil war reenactment setting posted on his blog right next to his “scholarly work.”
We covered two databases that could assist in weeding our unreliable authors: Web of Science and Marquis Who’s Who. Web of science looks like it will be more useful to me because it lists articles by the author and the number of times each of those articles was cited. Marquis Who’s Who will give information about an author that can be useful, but the arrangement it has with Baruch as a database might make accessing it difficult. There is also Google Scholar for looking at a record of citations, but I was told it was often unreliable. We also learned to analyze the other works published by an author and the author’s background – their profession, where they teach, etc – to see if they are relevant sources. I am still a little unclear about how an author’s profession would be a deciding factor in their quality, because oddly enough, some people who don’t have degrees might actually be very well-read and knowledgeable in their writing for one particular field, but I suppose that would come out based on references to them.
