NURS 660: Planning for Evidence-Based Practice: Evaluating Sources

Once you've found the sources for your project, your next step is to evaluate them.  This page reviews some basic criteria for evaluating scholarly sources, as well as some things specific to annotated bibliographies.  If you'd like more help as you're doing evaluating your sources, contact your librarian for the School of Nursing and Health Professions:

Basic Criteria for Evaluating a Scholarly Source

When you search for and find scholarly articles that you think you want to use in a project, there are basic criteria you can use to evaluate whether the article is reputable or not.  These criteria follow a method called the ABC's of Credibility:

A - Authority

• Author expertise and qualifications - What are the author's credentials and background in this subject area? Are they affiliated with reputable institutions or organizations? Do they have appropriate education, training, and experience to be knowledgeable on this topic?
• Type of publication - Is the source a book, academic journal, magazine, newspaper, website, blog? Is it a peer-reviewed scholarly publication? Generally, academic and professional sources are seen as more credible than popular media.
• Date of publication - Is the source up-to-date for the topic? When was it last updated? How recently was it published?
• Questioning Authority- Has the authority been questioned? Is this an isolated instance or a well-reasoned, tried and tested argument? Have people disagreed with it, and if so, what merits do their disagreements bear?

B - Biases

• Publisher reputation - For books/articles, what is the reputation of the publisher? Is it an established, reputable academic press or organization?
• Site sponsorship - For websites, who is responsible for the site? Is it tied to respected institutions, organizations, companies, or individuals? What might their motivations be for publishing this content?
• Objectivity - Does the source seem objective and unbiased? Or does it seem driven by a particular agenda or point of view?

C - Craftsmanship

• Writing quality - Is it clear, accurate, precise, and error-free? Or is the writing poor in quality?
• Logic and reasoning - Does the author make logical arguments and connections? Is their reasoning biased or emotionally driven?
• Evidence and citations - Does the author provide citations and references to credible sources? Is the information well-supported by evidence?

Advanced Criteria for Evaluating the Content of Your Scholarly Sources

Because the projects for this course are more complex, you also need to carefully evaluate the content of your sources.  Just using a reputable, unbiased article isn't enough.  Your second job when writing an annotated bibliography is to examine the research that was done and decide whether it positively contributes to the way medicine and nursing are practiced.

Some things to think about as you evaluate your articles are:

• Specific research questions set forth
• Defined and justified sample
• Valid data collection
• Appropriate analytic methods
• Interpretations based on the data

For more information on critiquing your sources, read the following: