Center for Writing

When your writing depends on delving into a subject, you’ll probably make use of websites as well as scholarly sources as you gain knowledge.   But writers need to be particularly savvy when judging the credibility of internet sources or they risk undermining their own credibility.   Judging websites can be tricky, though.   At University of California, Berkeley, librarians have developed an excellent guide to evaluating web resources so you don’t have to abandon these unregulated sites entirely in your academic research. 

They explain why it’s important to be critical web readers:

The World Wide Web can be a great place to accomplish research on many topics. But putting documents or pages on the web is easy, cheap or free, unregulated, and unmonitored (at least in the USA). There is a famous Steiner cartoon published in the New Yorker (July 5, 1993) with two dogs sitting before a terminal looking at a computer screen; one says to the other “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The great wealth that the Internet has brought to so much of society is the ability for people to express themselves, find one another, exchange ideas, discover possible peers worldwide they never would have otherwise met, and, through hypertext links in web pages, suggest so many other people’s ideas and personalities to anyone who comes and clicks. There are some real “dogs” out there, but there’s also great treasure.

Therein lies the rationale for evaluating carefully whatever you find on the Web. The burden is on you - the reader - to establish the validity, authorship, timeliness, and integrity of what you find.

Check out the UC Berkeley librarians’ thorough method for Evaluating Web Pages.