Throughout your time in college, you will be responsible for finding sources to use in your class assignments, and you’ll have to make judgments about when a source will be useful to you. This section will try to give you some tips for matching sources to assignments. You might have some practice doing this already. We want to emphasize that evaluating sources is not about making objective judgments about sources on their own, but about figuring out how well they match up to the project you’re working on. It usually isn’t about whether a source is good or bad, but more about whether it’s relevant to your work. If the answer is no, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with it—it just might not be the right fit for that moment.

Evaluating sources is also something that can look different depending on what field you're in. This guide is meant to give some general advice, but see this guide for more information about evaluating sources in STEM and this guide for political science and similar fields.

(Image text from Dawn Stahura's “ACT UP: Evaluating Sources”) 

The ACT UP method is one tool you can use when you're assessing whether or not to use a source in your work. It asks you to consider who the author is, whether the research is current, how true the information is, whether it is an unbiased source, and how privilege comes into play. We like the ACT UP method because it is focused on making privilege and bias explicit in the source evaluation process, in a way that some older methods of evaluating sources do not. 

If an author is privileged or biased in some way, that should not automatically disqualify a source from being used. However, it’s important to keep it in mind as you work on building your list of sources. Inclusive citation is a framework for incorporating diverse viewpoints into your research and citing marginalized authors. This guide to inclusive citation has some helpful tips and information for doing this.

There are other acronyms and strategies for determining whether sources are reliable and appropriate for your research. One that you may have heard of before is the CRAAP test, which asks you to consider many of the same questions as the ACT UP method. While this guide focuses on ACT UP, we absolutely encourage you to use whatever method works best for you! One resource we recommend is this handout about the CRAAP test from the California State University, Chico, which has more information about using the CRAAP test to comprehensively evaluate sources.

You can use the BEAM method to match sources you might want to use to specific parts of your assignment. In addition to evaluating sources using methods like ACT UP, it’s also useful to think about how you would actually use them in your paper. A source might be peer-reviewed, reliable, and relatively unbiased, but none of that matters if you can’t find a way to use it. That’s why we recommend using BEAM to think about the potential applications of your sources as you collect them.

(Image by Kristin M. Woodward and Kate L. Ganski)

• You might use a source for the background of your paper if it can provide some context about your topic and provide some introductory information.
• Your source might fall into the exhibit/evidence category if it can provide backup for your claim. Or you might be writing a paper that is really focused on a specific text or several specific texts—whether that’s a particular scientific study, a work of art, or a novel. If you’re going to deep-dive into a source in this way, it is probably part of this category. 
• You might use a source as part of your argument if you can engage with its claims. This doesn’t only mean that you need sources that agree with your point—you might be looking for something that goes against your argument in order to more precisely refute it.
• A source might help with your method if you can use it to aid in designing it. This might mean taking inspiration from the way a scientific experiment is set up to create your own study, or it might mean utilizing a particular theory or framework to help with your analysis.

(Table from Ohio State University Libraries’ Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research by Teaching & Learning)

It might feel like this is confusing or there’s some overlap between these categories. If you feel this way, don’t panic! This method is designed to get you thinking about how you might actually use sources in your assignment as you’re looking for them. We recommend trying out BEAM as you start to think about this, but if the way the categories are broken down doesn’t work for you, that’s okay—just try to keep the big ideas in the back of your mind.

These questions were developed to help guide your academic reading, and they can be used in a variety of ways. If your professor assigns a reading and you’re not sure what you’re supposed to get out of it, this is a good place to start—you can take notes on these questions, annotate with an eye to answering them, or just keep them in mind as you read. This framework can also help you evaluate a source and think about how you might use it in your own work. 

(Table from Vassar Libraries' Political Theory Research Guide)

When you have a source in front of you. these questions can help you focus on the main points of each section and hopefully give you a sense of what might be useful to you. You probably don’t have time to read the whole source at the stage where you’re just exploring your options, but you shouldn't have to—if there are specific questions you’re trying to answer, you can use the chart to figure out where you might look in the paper.

We hope this guide can give you some ideas to help you with evaluating sources. You don’t have to memorize all of these acronyms (unless that’s what helps you most!), but it is important to think about the big concepts from these methods. These are some of the main points to keep in mind:

• If a source looks good, try to make sure it’s relevant and helpful for your paper or whatever assignment you’re working on—the criteria for a "good" source are different depending on the subject and the assignment. 
• Think about where you might use a given source in your paper. Figuring out which section it could go in and how you might engage with it will help you to decide whether to include it.
• As you start to read (or maybe just skim) a source, keep in mind the questions that each section should be addressing and look for the answers to those key questions.
• Be mindful of the privilege and potential bias of the authors you’re thinking about citing and intentionally bring in marginalized voices. You’re going to run into bias and privilege a lot, and it shouldn’t stop you from using a source completely, but it’s important to keep it in mind.

You've got this! And if you have any other questions about how to evaluate sources or want more specialized help, visit our Ask a Librarian page to get in touch with us.