Module 4: Evaluate Information, Relevance (1 page 1) what's this?
| Relevance | Objectivity | Authority | Documentation |
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Perhaps the first issue you
should decide when you find a source is its relevancy.
The answers to two questions can help you decide if the
material is relevant. While you’ll need to go all the way to the
end of the ROAD to see if the source is usable in your research,
the first question will help you decide whether you should spend
more
time with the web source or quickly discard that web source and move
on to the next one.
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Question 1: Is the source related to my research paper topic?
To
answer this question, you must make an assessment of the content of
the source and decide if it is relevant
to your topic. To put it
another way, the source must be usable in your research paper.
If you’re writing about learning styles in the education setting
and one of the results of a web search led to a website on different
management styles in the corporate setting, you most likely will not be
able to use the information, even if you find it entertaining and
informative.
Question
2: Is the source current?
To
be relevant to your research paper, the source will most likely need
to be current.
You have to make two judgments about the ‘currency’ of
information when it comes to sources.
First, you must know about what signifies as current in your field.
For example, our education major writing about learning styles is
likely to need more recently published information than a literature major
writing about Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates. Whether you’re searching for information on learning styles
or Plato, you must be concerned with the currency of your documents
in another way. If you're
looking at web documents, you also want to look for indications that the
material is kept up-to-date.
There may be dates on the page to indicate when it was first
written, when it was last updated, or when it was last revised.
Again, these two questions (Is the web source related to my research paper topic? and Is the web source current?) will help you decide the issue of relevancy.
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Copyright 2003 by the Academic Center, the University of Houston-Victoria, and
Summer Leibensperger.
Created 2003 by Summer Leibensperger.
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