In this “information age,” so much information is readily available on the Internet. With so much at our fingertips, it is crucial to be able to critically search and sort this information in order to select credible sources that can provide reliable and useful data to support your ideas and convince your audience.

Popular Sources vs Academic Sources

From your previous academic writing courses, you are likely familiar with academic journals and how they differ from popular sources, as in magazines shown in Figure 11.1. Academic journals contain peer-reviewed articles written by scholars for other scholars, often presenting their original research, reviewing the original research of others, or performing a “meta-analysis” (an analysis of multiple studies that analyze a given topic). Peer reviewing is a lengthy vetting process where each article is evaluated by other experts in the field.

Popular sources, in contrast, are written for a more general audience or following. While these pieces may be well researched, they are usually only vetted by an editor or if the writer seeks out additional review. Popular sources tend to be more accessible to wider audiences. They also tend to showcase more visible biases based on their intended readership or viewership. If you would like to refresh your memory on this topic, consult your library or writing center for resources.^[1] Figure 11. 1 ^[2] below illustrates a newsstand with a number of popular sources.

In contrast to these covers of popular sources, Figure 11.2 ^[3] illustrates the front page of a scholarly journal article. The differences in layout, design, and information included demonstrate some of the differences in the priorities of these two types of sources.

Scholarly articles published in academic journals are usually required sources in academic research essays; they are also an integral part of engineering projects and technical reports. Furthermore, many projects require a  literature review, which collects, summarizes, and sometimes evaluates the work of researchers in the field whose work has been recognized as a valuable contribution to that field. Scholarly sources such as journal articles are usually cited as the major contributors, though other scholarly documents including books, conference proceedings, and major reports may also be incorporated into a literature review based on the discipline the writer is in. 

Journal articles are not the only kind of research you will find useful. Since you are researching in a professional field and preparing for the workplace, there are many credible kinds of sources you will draw on in a professional context. Table 11.2 lists several types of sources you may find useful in researching your projects.

Table 11.2. Typical research sources for technical projects.

Searching for scholarly and credible sources available to you through an academic library is not quite as simple as conducting a search on a popular internet search engine. See Appendix: Search Strategies to learn more about keywords, different ways of narrowing or broadening a search, and other information that will help you use your library’s resources to their fullest potential.

Evaluating Sources

The importance of critically evaluating your sources for authority, relevance, timeliness, and credibility cannot be overstated. Anyone can put anything on the internet, and people with strong web and document design skills can make this information look very professional and credible—even if it isn’t. Since much research is currently done online and many sources are available electronically, developing your critical evaluation skills is crucial to finding valid, credible evidence to support and develop your ideas. Even clear classifications of types of sources are no guarantee of objectivity or credibility. Some books may be published by presses with specific political agendas, and some journals, which look academic/scholarly at first glance, actually don’t use a robust peer-review method and instead focus on profit. Don’t blindly trust sources without carefully considering the whole context, and don’t dismiss a valuable source because it is popular, crowdsourced, or from a non-profit blog.

When evaluating research sources and presenting your own research, be careful to critically evaluate the authority, content, and purpose of the material, using questions in Table 11.3. When evaluating sources for use in a document, consider how the source will affect your own credibility or ethos.

Table 11.3. Evaluating authority, content, and purpose of information.

When evaluating sources, you will also want to consider how you plan to use the source and why. There are several reasons for why you would use a particular source. Perhaps it is a scientific study that supports your claim that emissions from certain types of vehicles are higher than those of others. Or maybe the writer uses particularly effective phrasing or an example that your readers will respond to. Or perhaps it is a graph that effectively shows trends from the past ten years. Source use, like any choice you make when producing a document, should be purposeful.

Part of using sources purposefully is interrogating your own reasons for using a source. Specifically, be aware of cherry picking and confirmation bias. Cherry picking is the use of inadequate or unrepresentative data that only supports your position and ignores substantial amounts of data that contradicts it. Comprehensive research addresses contradictory evidence from credible sources and uses all data to inform its conclusions. Confirmation bias refers to when you (unintentionally or otherwise) only consult sources that you know will support your idea. Given the pie chart in Figure 11.3, ^[4] if you only consulted articles that rejected global warming in a project related to that topic, you would be guilty of cherry picking and confirmation bias. (While we caution in Chapter 8: Graphics not to use pie charts with only two sections, the extreme contrast in this pie chart creates a valuable rhetorical effect.)

Finally, you will also want to consider if you are representing the collected data accurately. As a researcher, you are responsible for treating your sources ethically. Being ethical in this context means both attributing data to its sources and providing accurate context for that data. Occasionally, you may find a specific quotation or data point that seems to support one interpretation; however, once you read the source, you realize that the writer was describing an outlier or critiquing an incorrect point. Another common representation error is claiming that an author says something that they never actually say. In your text, you need to be clear regarding where your information is coming from and where your ideas diverge from those of the source. See Chapter 3 for more detailed discussion on bias.