Section

 

Finding information you need

It is very important to use reliable, accurate information in your assignments but how do you ensure that the information you have found is of good quality and is relevant for your assignment?

How do you decide which references out of those you have found are worth following up?

When you have located the book, journal article or web page, is the information it contains appropriate for the particular assignment you are doing at the time?

Quality control

Traditional information sources such as books and journals are subject to quality reviews and editorial control. However you still need to critically evaluate their content for authority, bias, and currency.

The Internet is full of information but not all of it the high quality you might hope for. This may be because:

• Anyone can publish anything on the Internet
• Information comes unfiltered and neither peer review nor editorial process is in place
• Internet resources can come in many different formats and designs and can change at any moment
• Any part of the Internet can become unavailable at any moment

Therefore, the quality of Internet resources varies a great deal. It is usually left up to the user to decide whether the resource is of a high or low quality.