Here are some suggested activities related to finding and evaluating sources. Please feel free to use these with your students - or talk to your liaison librarian about source-related activities for your discipline.

• ACT UP method: Choose a source or sources and have students practice going through the ACT UP acronym in groups.
  • We recommend giving your own overview of the acronym first in order to help students learn how to apply the method to your particular subject area. For example, for certain STEM subjects it might be a critical part of the "truth" and "unbias" elements that a study be a double-blinded randomized controlled trial.
• BEAM method: Give students examples of academic writing that cite outside sources and asks them to identify how they’re being used. This comes from the Ohio State Press’s Guide to Choosing and Using Sources, which you can consult for more information and an example. We suggest adapting it for your discipline and choosing any academic article that’s relevant to your class. Students can work together to determine how the author is using each source according to the BEAM method.
• Matching sources to assignments: Give students a list of examples of potential sources and ask them to brainstorm what kinds of papers they might use them in.
  • For example, you might ask students how they could use a tweet where a scientist criticizes a paper by another researcher. Though it probably shouldn't be used on its own as evidence against the other researcher's paper, one potential answer is that this might be useful in a paper analyzing linguistic differences in how scientists communicate with the general public versus in academic writing. 

• Individually, in small groups, or as a class, use the inverted triangle model to search for sources. Begin with Google or Google Scholar; then a large academic database (JSTOR, Web of Science, or Scopus); then a specialized database in your subject area (e.g., EconLit, MLA, etc.). Ask students to search in each one, using the same (or similar) keywords, and take notes on what they find:
  • How many results do they get in each search?
  • What types of sources appear in their results?
  • What does each tool do well, and what are its limitations or challenges?
  • How might they use these resources (very broad search engine, academic database, subject-specific database) in their research?
• Individually, in small groups, or as a class, practice bibliographic tracing. Begin with a scholarly source, review the references/notes/bibliography, and give students time to identify and search for one or two of these sources in Library Search and databases.
• Encourage students to keep a research journal, or to write a short (1-page) reflection on their research process. They might include the search tools and strategies they used, keywords or subjects, challenges encountered, and how they navigated discovering sources for their research.