Investigate Further
Mr. Watson, meet Sherlock Holmes!
Investigating further is one of the most critical steps on the road to
evaluating information.
It is a good idea to:
- Examine the sources listed in the resource that
you are evaluating (look for a list of cited references or a
bibliography); but it would be a mistake to stop there!
- Look beyond the resource at hand to
verify or refute information presented.
Here are some good places to start:
1. Follow up:
Obtain a selection of the resource's cited
references.
- For books and videos, try the Library
Catalog.
- For articles, search for the journal title (not
the article title) in the Journal Locator. Otherwise, check search
engines in case the text may be online.
- Interlibrary
loan may be an option if the library does not provide access
to the document that you're seeking.
2. Check outside sources:
Check any facts that appear suspicious by looking
for outside articles on the topic at hand. Find out if the information
is corroborated or not.
- A good place to begin is the Library's menu of
databases.
- Most of these databases are already vetted
by academic librarians, so you can expect to find scholarly,
peer-reviewed materials. Another place to look for scholarly
publications is Google Scholar.
- If you're relying on web pages discovered on
the free Web, try using sites that rate pages, like Librarians'
Index to the Internet, the Scout
Report, or INFOMINE for some indication of
their quality.
3. Find background information:
If you're unfamiliar with a topic addressed by the
source you're evaluating, locate background information. If it's a hot
topic, a good place to begin might be the CQ Researcher.
The following types of resources might also be consulted:
4. Consult biographies and business
information:
Learning about the life and work of the author,
chief editor, or publishing
executive will inform your assessment of
a publication, giving you some idea of the degree of
expertise or bias reflected in the work.
The library offers a wide selection of tools to help you find biographies.
If you don't yet have the name of the party
responsible for disseminating the information, it can be helpful to
backtrack through the media ownership chain
of command and look for the name of the associated
source, organization, company, or director.
A useful tool for discovering who owns what media
outlet is the Columbia Journalism Review. The
Library's Mergent Online database is useful
for investigating corporate affiliations and identifying company
executives.
5. Get the lowdown:
If you're researching a
controversial topic, and several sources disagree with
one another, you'll have to try to get to the bottom of
the matter yourself.
Just as a detective interviews witnesses of a
crime, you may be able to find firsthand accounts to inform your
inquiry.
Examples of primary documents
include:
- correspondence
- diary entries
- email messages
- eyewitness newspaper articles
- poems
- interviews
- vital records (such as birth certificates)
- United States Constitution
You can find some primary documents (texts, sound
recordings, videos) in the Library's collection, by searching the Library
Catalog. When searching the catalog, the
following keywords will help you isolate primary resources:
- correspondence
- diaries
- document
- interviews
- letters
- manuscripts
- personal narratives
- quotations
- reports
- sources (this is the most popular term for
describing primary works)
- speeches
Besides looking in the Library catalog, primary
source material can be found in the following types of databases
available on the Library website: images, legal research, newspapers, statistics, and history, among others.
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