Identifying Credible and Scholarly Resources Online
If you use Google, cross check these points with your resource to determine if the article is credible AND scholarly:
- The organization that runs the website is nonprofit or government controlled
- The authors have credentials
- Online editing is inaccessible to the public (only the organization can edit the content--so...not Wikipedia!)
- There should be no to very little advertisements
- A visible date when the article was published
- A reference/works cited page
Also look at the chart below to see the identifying factors that help individuals distinguish scholarly, popular, and trade resources from one another:
