Locating Evidence in the Agricultural Sciences

Evaluating Sources: Questions to Ask & Strategies for Getting the Answers (Berkeley Library):

Action: When you find a source during your research and you are considering using information from it as part of an assignment, consider these questions:

• Authority: Can you identify the author or creator? What are the author's credentials (educational background, past writing, experience) in this area?
• Currency: Is the source current or out of date for your topic? Can you find a date of publication or when the source was last updated?
• Purpose: What is the purpose or motive for the publication/site? (e.g., educational, commercial, entertainment, promotional) Is it trying to sell you something?
• Bias: Would you say the information is fact, opinion, or propaganda? In other words, what's the bias? Is the author's point of view objective and impartial?
• Accuracy of Details: Does the information appear to be valid and well-researched? Are sources listed in a bibliography or included in links to the documents themselves? Are the sources themselves authoritative?

Review or Primary Research?

Scientific and quantitative research articles are written differently than articles in the social sciences and humanities. For starters, scientific journals tend to publish a mix of review articles, news, letters or short communications, opinion/editorials, and original research. News sources often report on primary (original) studies in easily understood language but you should always look up the primary article (try using these databases) to see if the reporting is accurate! Review articles are summaries of original research that tend to be easier for lay people to approach.

Checklist

PRIMARY RESEARCH articles tend to follow a pretty standard layout, consisting of:

1. Original research (includes the data)

2. Usually reported in the following sections:

1. Abstract
2. Introduction/Background
3. Methods 
4. Results
5. Discussion/Conclusion

Glossary

Analyze and evaluate your search results. Have you found the most authoritative, accurate, objective, up-to-date, scholarly information available on your research topic?

When doing research you will come across a lot of information from different types of sources. How do you decide which source to use? From tweets to newspaper articles, the guide below provides a brief description of each and breaks down 6 factors of what to consider when selecting a source.

Know Your Sources: A Guide to Understanding Sources

When doing research you will come across articles published in "periodicals." This category of resource includes scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, and even tabloids such as you'd see by the checkout in a grocery store. The guide below provides a brief description of the different types of periodicals and what to look for to help you use publications appropriate for your research. 

Distinguishing Scholarly from Non-Scholarly Periodicals: A Checklist of Criteria shows how to evaluate periodicals by looking at their format, intended audience, and appearance.

Want more info? See this Evaluating Resources webpage from Cornell University Library for additional information about evaluating sources that you find during your research. 

What's peer review and why should you care? Check out this Peer Review in 3 Minutes video by North Carolina State University Library.

There is a direct way to find out if a journal is peer-reviewed:

• Use a search engine and search for the journal's home page and check under About This Journal. Often the brief description of the journal will note that it is peer-reviewed or refereed or will list the Editors or Editorial Board.

BE CAREFUL! A journal can be refereed/peer-reviewed and still have non-peer reviewed articles in it. Generally if the article is an editorial, brief news item or short communication, it's not been through the full peer-review process. Databases like Agricultural & Environmental Science database will let you restrict your search only to articles (and not editorials, conference proceedings, etc).