It’s exciting to plan for a trip to a place where you’ve never been before, but it can also feel somewhat overwhelming.  First, you have to determine where you want to go, and you’ll probably have to consider whether you’re looking for a relaxing trip or one where you stay busy, if you want to stay close to home or would you like to travel further away, or if you would like warm weather or cooler weather.  You might ask others about their experiences with travel or where they’ve gone, and you might start looking online to see what options are available to you.

“Oh no! That Reddit forum said that this was the best hotel in the country! I’ll never take travel advice from ur_pwnd666 again!”

When you’re looking, though, you generally are going to want information from people who have actually gone to that location or who you trust have looked into the area further.  You want details about where to stay, what to do, and where to eat, and your sources for that information are important.  Your research for this trip will need to have reliable sources.

The same process applies when locating and evaluating sources for your essays.  Researching for information to learn more about a topic, to challenge what you know, or to support your opinion can be a daunting challenge.  Where can you find information?  How do you search for it?  Can you trust what you find??

The internet has made this process much easier by putting more material right at our fingertips — rather than spending hours at the library searching through physical books or microfiche, you can use a search term to comb through all sorts of mediums to locate more relevant results in just minutes!

However, finding relevant sources that are also reliable is a new challenge presented with new technology.  Evaluating sources is necessary to ensure that the author has credibility and that the information is correct. This section gives you information on what types of sources you’ll encounter, recommendations for evaluating websites, and how to identify biases or perspectives of the author(s).