Information is not created in a vacuum. Rather it is always produced within specific contexts and for particular audiences. Keep the following in mind when evaluating any information source, whether web-based or not.
- First hand accounts of an historical event, photographs of an artwork published in a book, and a novel or other literary work are all examples of primary sources. For historians and literary scholars, diaries, blogs, letters, and speeches are also primary sources.
- Articles written for academic journals or books published by university presses, whether found on the open web, from the library's website, or in print, are all examples of scholarly sources cited by academics.
- Articles written for popular magazines (e.g., Time) or newspapers have little-to-no impact on scholarly debates. Students, however, are likely to find such sources useful when the goal is to find credible, general interest treatments of a topic.
- Editorials and position papers, of course, are meant to sway readers to a certain point of view. "Issue advocacy" is abundant on the open web but also shows up in a range of source types associated with the library including trade publications, newspapers (e.g., a New York Times editorial), and even in scholarly journals.
- Comedies or satirical pieces entertain, critique, and/or provoke. These sources will likely be studied as creative works (i.e., primary sources).
- Sales pitches intended to solicit money, make a sale, or elicit a particular action on the part of the reader, and that financially benefit a website's author and/or sponsor, should be avoided. On the other hand, there are legitimate reasons a researcher might wish to cite a commercial website (e.g., if they are studying it as a primary source).
Context is critical in evaluating a website or any other information source. For example, a researcher would not necessarily expect to find a bibliography on a film's official website, but would expect to see a list of works cited at the end of a scholarly journal article about the film.
Examine a website's URL for clues to context. Look at the top-level domain (i.e., the characters that appear before the initial single slash ("/") or at the end if there are no slashes). Top-level domains are not dispositive but rather clues to help you evaluate a website:
- .edu indicates an educational institution in the U.S.
- .gov indicates a government agency
- .org indicates a corporate entity, often but not always a non-profit
- .com, .info, .net, all indicate commercial websites ranging from corporate to personal and generally warrant the most vetting
- Most countries have their own multi-character code: France, .fr; Canada, .ca; Australia, .au. Wikipedia maintains a comprehensive and up-to-date list of all country domains.