| TO FIND | USE |
|---|---|
| Scholarly Research in Academic Journals | Indexes and Full-text Databases |
| Articles in Other Journals & Magazines | Magazine and Newspaper Indexes and Databases |
| Current Events / News | News Databases, Digitized Collections, Digests, Indexes, News Websites |
| Books | Library Catalogues, Textbooks, Bibliographies, Indexes, Online Bookstores, Online Book Collections |
| Other Academic Work (Theses, Conference Papers, Essays) |
Library Catalogues, Special Indexes and Databases |
| Government Information | Library Catalogues, Indexes, Publication Lists, Internet, Access to Information Requests |
| Political Party Information | Library Catalogues, Internet |
| Research from Policy Institutes, Think Tanks and Other Organizations | Library Catalogues, Indexes and Databases, Bibliographies, Internet |
| Videos | Library Catalogues, Video Catalogues |
Whenever you receive information, for whatever purpose, you should be evaluating its reliability before you believe it, use it, or repeat it. The need to evaluate information sources is more obvious when you have a project due in a short time and you are faced with hundreds or thousands of books, articles, and other potential sources of information. You cannot possibly read them all, so in the process of selecting information sources for your research project you need to evaluate which will be the best.
There are many ways to evaluate information. The more experienced the researcher is in a field, the easier it will be to make evaluative judgments about information and to decide whether it is suitable for use in your research project. For students and researchers new to the field of Canadian politics and government this process is more difficult. One way to start can be to use only sources recommended by experts: books on reading lists, in selective, evaluative bibliographies, or in the recommended reading lists of textbooks and subject guides. However, most research topics will require branching out further. Link to the following for some of the tools and techniques you can use to help you evaluate information and sources of information:
Books
Articles
Websites
Writing Annotations/Reviews
Fact-Checking