Evaluating Sources

Learning Objectives

  • Use methods for evaluating sources and determining their relevance to your historical research

Evaluating Sources

The next step is to decide what information is best for your assignment. You need to evaluate it carefully to check its quality and that it is relevant and useful.

To decide what information is best for your assignment you need to evaluate it carefully to check its quality and that it’s relevant and useful. There are several ways to check for the quality of your sources. One fantastic way is the SIFT Method. This method says to:

  • STOP. Think critically. Avoid being too emotionally charged or looking for information that confirms your own biases. Have an open mind to consider new or controversial topics, and seek to understand. Don’t accept everything you read as fact, especially your first results.
  • INVESTIGATE. Find out who the author is and why they wrote it.
  • FIND BETTER COVERAGE. Read laterally. Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source. Are other websites also reporting on the same thing, or are other scholars making similar claims?
  • TRACE CLAIMS. Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original source. This way you can verify its accuracy and determine its credibility.

Another common way to evaluate sources is by using the CRAAP Method. The CRAAP test can help you think critically about what you read and figure out if it is suitable for your research assignment. CRAAP stands for:

  • Current – is it current? Or if searching for a primary source from a specific time period, is it current to the time period in question?
  • Relevant – is it relevant to your topic?
  • Authority – was it produced by someone with authority?
  • Accuracy – was it accurate?
  • Purpose – what is the information’s purpose?

Link to Learning

Use these links for additional support on about how to evaluate a source using the CRAAP test:

Try It

Why is it important to determine the credibility of sources?

Critical Thinking for Reading and Research

Critical thinking is important in every part of your studies and is a useful skill for work and life. Critical thinking isn’t about being negative—it involves not automatically accepting what you read or hear but thinking about its accuracy and relevance. You should question the information, ideas, and arguments that you hear and analyze them to reach your own conclusions. The most important part of critical thinking is actively asking questions. The who, what, where, when, why, and how questions can help you understand, analyze, and evaluate the information and ideas you are looking at.

Research Tip: Reading Skills

When you’re studying it’s helpful to be able to read effectively and efficiently. Reading efficiently and effectively means reading what is relevant, without wasting time. When you find a source, first survey, skim, and scan to find the most important concepts. Use search tools (like Ctrl+F) to look for keywords.

Doing this will help you figure out what an article or book is about quickly and find the main ideas or specific information. This can help you decide if you need to read in more detail.

Then if the source seems promising, use a strategy to break your reading down into manageable chunks, such reading a section, or a paragraph. Keep your research question in mind so that you are always asking, “How can this support my research?”

Let’s practice with an example. Imagine that you are asked to complete a research project about economic opportunity for Black Americans during the Great Migration. You would use a keyword search to find books and articles that you could use for your research topic. For example, you might use phrases such as “Great Migration economy”, “Great Migration African Americans”, or “Great Migration economic mobility” in your search engine. Doing so might have led you to this article below. Let’s read it to see if it connects to the research topic.

Source Excerpt

Can You Move to Opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration

Author: Ellora Derenoncourt
American Economic Review 2022, 112(2): 369–408. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20200002

“Childhood location has long run effects on adult outcomes. This fact has become the basis for “moving to opportunity” policies that aim to reduce poverty by moving families from disadvantaged neighborhoods to better ones (Chetty and Hendren 2018a, Bergman et al. 2019). Using arguably the largest natural experiment in “moving to opportunity” in US history, this paper assesses the general equilibrium effects of policies of this type.

Between 1940 and 1970, during the Great Migration, four million African Americans left the US South, where they faced severe restrictions on their social, political, and economic rights under Jim Crow. They settled in urban areas in the North and West of the United States, where racial hierarchies were substantially less pronounced. This massive population movement radically transformed the racial demographics of destination cities, prompting White flight from urban neighborhoods and potentially altering the policies of local governments (Boustan 2010, Tabellini 2018).

This paper shows that northern cities’ responses to the Great Migration (also termed “Migration”) ultimately reduced the gains from growing up in destination locations. The effects have been particularly detrimental for Black men. Those growing up in former Great Migration commuting zones (CZs) today have lower adult income than those from similarly resourced families, but in locations less affected by the Migration. The channel appears to be changes in the environment for families, rather than ex post sorting of negatively selected families into destinations. In response to Black migrant arrivals in the mid-century, White families withdrew from shared urban neighborhoods and public schools. By the late 1960s, riots broke out in Great Migration urban areas, and in the subsequent decades destination cities increased police spending, suffered from higher murder rates, and incarcerated a greater share of the population. Today, roughly 27 percent of the gap in upward mobility between Black and White families in the urban North can be attributed to changes induced by the Great Migration.

I draw on a large number of data sources to conduct the analysis in this paper. To establish the main results on upward mobility, I use the complete count of US censuses from 1900 to 1940 and contemporary measures from Chetty and Hendren (2018b) and Chetty et al. (2020). To understand mechanisms, I assembled a new database on local government expenditures, private schools, crime, incarceration, and other characteristics of destinations spanning the period 1920–2015.”

Try It

Evaluate the source above using the CRAAP test to determine if it is suitable for a research assignment on how the Great Migration impacted Black Americans economically in the 1920s.

Is it current?

Is it relevant?

Was it written by something with authority?

Is it accurate?

What is the purpose of this information?

Annotated Bibliographies

Now that you’ve found a source and evaluated it to confirm that it is relevant and useful to you, you may be asked to create an annotated bibliography. Don’t be intimidated by an annotated bibliography—it’s really just a simple way for you to keep track of some of the sources that you find. Your instructor may have specific requirements with things you should include in your annotated bibliography, but they typically have three parts: a citation, a summary of the work, and a description of how the work connects to your research topic. Let’s look at an example below.

Sample Annotated Bibliography in Chicago Manual of Style format

For this bibliography, a student was searching for answers to the following research question:

  • How was the women’s suffrage movement in the United States inspired by or in conflict with the abolition and Black American suffrage movement?

(Note that in your document, you’ll want to format all of the citations with a hanging indent.)

(Part 1: Citation.) Douglass, Frederick. “The Women’s Suffrage Movement, Address Before the International Council of Women, Washington, D.C., March 31, 1888.” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Philip S. Foner, and Yuval Taylor, Chicago Review Press, 2000. 

(Part 2: A summary.) A complete transcript of Douglass addressing suffragettes where he recalls his former speech at the Seneca Falls conference. He argues that while his previous speech came at a time that he could offer help to the movement, women should now be the spokespeople and power behind their own movement. He compares suffrage for women and African Americans. (Part 3: A connection to the research topic.) In addition to his drawing parallels between the movements, as an important figure in the abolition movement and social reform, Douglass’ involvement in Seneca Falls and this convention shows the ties between the two movements.

 

(Part 1: Citation.) Spruill, Marjorie Julian. “Race, Reform, and Reaction at the  Turn of the Century: Southern Suffragists, the Nawsa, and the ‘Southern Strategy’ In Context.” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, edited by Jean H. Baker. Oxford University Press, 2002.

(Part 2: A summary.) Spruill examines southern White suffragettes’ compromise to, or outright alliance with, White supremacists in the latter 19th century. She argues that southern White suffragettes adopted racist tactics to attain success in their goals during a time of poisonous race relations in the United States. (Part 3: A connection to the research topic.) The book demonstrates the conflict within the movement, as suffragettes intentionally juxtaposed their cause against the rights of Black Americans to gain the support of White men. Southerners argued that more enfranchised White people (even women) would strengthen their supremacy.

 

(Part 1: Citation.) Wellman, Judith. The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention. University of Illinois Press, 2004.

(Part 2: A summary.) In The Road to Seneca Falls, Wellman argues that the first women’s convention was the beginning of women’s suffrage and one of the greatest social movements in U.S. history. She argues that this was made possible by a confluence of social, economic, and cultural factors. The book puts the convention and movement in the context of the times and gives an understanding of the event in its own right. Wellman gives evidence and examples of how the convention brought together activists from many areas, including abolitionists and Quakers. (Part 3: A connection to the research topic.) The book provides in-depth information about the demographics of the attendees, including their political affiliations. It examines specific women with ties to abolition, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, and Abby Kell.

Keep Track of What Your Find

An essential part of research is compiling and keeping track of all of your sources. Keep a list of everything you read, including information that you decide not to use. That way you’ll remember what you’ve looked at and won’t waste time going back to resources that weren’t useful. You’ll also have a good idea of what sources you’ve relied on so that you don’t run the risk of accidentally plagiarizing.

You can keep a running list of sources inside of a document, or there are tons of online tools to help you track and cite your sources, such as Zotero, Mendeley, or Easybib. Your instructor can provide details about their preferred citation styles, but the most commonly used style in History courses is Chicago, though many humanities courses also use MLA.

Link to Learning

For a review of plagiarism and an overview of citation styles, visit this page on citing sources from an earlier section of a U.S. History textbook.

Hack Activity #3

In this hack, we’ve reviewed the beginning stages of the research process. Hopefully, now you feel better about:

  1. Understanding the assignment
  2. Selecting a research topic/developing a research question
  3. Conducting research: finding and evaluating sources

Let’s give this a try. Let’s work with the prompt: “Evaluate and analyze the ideas, agenda, strategies, and effectiveness of the work done by a 20th-century American reformer or activist.” For this exercise, you should reflect on each of the questions and activities. You can jot down your ideas or notes for your answers in the spaces below.

What reformer or activist would you like to research?

What is a preliminary research question you can ask about your topic?

Use your library database to find an article connected to your topic. What is the citation for your source?

Create a modified annotated bibliography for your source. In it, include the summary of the article, and a description of how the article connects to your research topic.