You will need to evaluate each source you consider using by asking two questions:

• Is this source trustworthy?
• Is this source suitable?

Not every suitable source is trustworthy, and not every trustworthy source is suitable.

Determining Suitability

Your task as a researcher is to determine the appropriateness of the information your source contains for your particular research project. It is a simple question, really: will this source help me answer the research questions that I am posing in my project? Will it help me learn as much as I can about my topic? Will it help me write an interesting, convincing essay for my readers?

Need a good way to evaluate a source?  Take a look at its “craap”!

The CRAAP method is one way to determine the validity and relevance of a source. CRAAP stands for

• C: Currency. When was the information published?
• R: Relevance. How relevant to your goals is the information?
• A: Authority. How well does the author of the information know the information?
• A: Accuracy. How reliable is the information?
• P: Purpose. Why does this information exist in this way?

Watch the two-minute video below to reinforce these ideas.

If the source you’re looking at is fairly current, relevant, and accurate, it’s probably a good source to use. Depending on the aim of your paper, you’ll be looking for an authority and purpose that are unbiased and informative. Currency can depend on your topics: it might mean within the past year for some topics, but for others, it might be within the past twenty years. The state of some fields changes very rapidly, but even in fields that seem historically bounded (e.g., Medieval Spanish literature), currency has a lot to do with whether the topic you’re researching is currently hot. If ten scholars have revolutionized thinking about ecocriticism in medieval Spanish literature in the past two years, currency will be affected. You can get a sense of how hot a topic is by ordering the results in a database search chronologically from the most recent (often the default system for a scholarly database), or you can ask your instructor.