Advanced Source Evaluation Tool

Dr. Eric Drown

1. Are your sources long enough to treat their subjects with complexity and sophistication? Sources that present matter-of-fact answers in brief are likely oversimplifying the matter. 2. Are your sources treating readers as partners-in-inquiry, or as mere decoders of information? Youre looking for sources that treat readers as partners-in-inquiry. 3. Do your sources use specialized vocabulary, indicating that they are concept-rich? Or do they tend to present information in everyday language? You should be looking for sources that use specialized language. 4. Do your sources interact with the ideas of other writers and thinkers, defining their projects, forwarding and countering their ideas, and assessing the uses and limits of the sources they cite? Or do they present themselves as having all the answers, writing apart from other thinkers working on similar topic? Youre looking for sources that take other writers ideas into account. 5. Do your sources seek merely to establish a fact or causal/correlative relationship in the data? Or are they pursuing a line of inquiry to think through the implications or meaning of their observations? Youre looking for sources that pursue a line of inquiry. 6. Does your source set accurately and fairly represent an existing conversation on your area of research, including both scholarly sources and sources of informed public commentary? 7. Does your source set include a conversation changer, a source that rethinks something that one of your other source takes for granted? 8. Can you imagine making your own use of each article in your source set? Can you see yourself having something to say back to the text? 9. Can you imagine putting your sources in conversation with each other? Do they speak to one another in ways that move the existing conversation forward? Can you identify or infer the issues that likely started the conversation? Is everyone in the conversation saying the same thing? Is anyone listening and responding to anyone else, or following a thread in the conversation? Or are your sources all speaking about different aspects of the problem without addressing themselves to the conversation going on around them?