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Justify Your Sources

Online Library Home > Help Doing Research > 6 Steps to Research

Evaluating Sources
It's always necessary to evaluate each resource before including it in your research paper, whether it's published in print or not. Scholarly books and journals are evaluated prior to publication. Scholarly information is evaluated by editors and in peer review.

Most information found on the Internet has never been through any kind of quality control, so you must be even more rigorous and careful in evaluating it yourself. Criteria for evaluating information can be found here: Tips for Evaluating Online Sources

Citing Sources
You must always cite the resources you use to find your information. Citing sources serves two purposes:

    • it gives credit to the originator of the ideas
    • it lets readers trace ideas back to their sources so that they can find out more information and judge its quality for themselves.

Whether you quote others directly or just reference their ideas, you need to cite their works to avoid charges of plagiarism. To learn more, visit the plagiarism section of the Empire State College's web site on Academic Integrity.

There are several standard formats for documenting your sources. If you instructor doesn't say which to use, ask them. The most common formats are MLA, APA, and Chicago/Turabian. Before you start your bibliography, read more about how to use the documentation formats, at the Empire State College Writing Resource Center.

For a complete listing of citation examples check out the "Research and Documentation" web site based upon Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference at http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/.
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