Recognizing Relevant, High Quality Journals and Web Resources

One of the challenging things to do is to find journal articles and resources on the web that are relevant to your topic and are high quality. Oh, you'll find LOTS of journals and web resources, but many of them will not be of the quality and level of sophistication that you need for your professional work. Remember that part of the individual outcomes for your webquest is the preparation and submission of the following annotated references from the expert role (diversity, clinical practice, patient education) that you will assume:

1. 2-3 relevant and high quality journal articles in APA format
2. 2-3 relevant and high quality web resources in APA format

Relevant and high quality references are important. This brief guide will direct you to some resources that will assist you in making determinations about relevance and quality.

Judging Journal Articles

In terms of journal articles, one of the myths you'll immediately confront is the idea that everything in print must be good. NOT! There are different "levels" of journals. Not all journals are treated alike, in terms of who publishes in them, their status in the academic community, and how frequently their articles are quoted. The website of the Olin & Uris Libraries at Cornell University has an excellent resource for you to review in judging the quality of print resources, some of which is applicable to web resources. Check out their Critically Analyzing Information Sources at http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill26.htm.

You can start assessing the quality of a resource from its reference, or bibliographic citation. Look for things such as the author, date of publication, edition or revision, publisher, and title of journal. Go to the Cornell University site referenced above to find out specifics about each of these items that you should examine.

Once you have the item in hand (or on the computer screen, in the case of online journal references), then you should do a thorough analysis of the article's content, including areas such as intended audience, objective reasoning, coverage, writing style, and evaluative reviews. Again, head over to the Cornell University site for some explicit details on precisely how to conduct this evaluation.

Judging Web Resources

There are several myths about the web:

• everything you need is available on the web - absolutely not! Most journal articles and most all books are not available on the web. We still need our libraries - whether they're virtual or based in buildings that we visit!
• the web is the world's biggest encyclopedia - this one isn't true either. An encyclopedia implies organization, some quality standards, and control. While there's a lot of information on the web, all of it isn't organized, of high quality, nor overseen by a group for relevancy and currency. You might, however, want to check out Wikipedia, which has been compared to Encyclopedia Britannica - only better! Wikipedia is edited by regular computer users, such as yourself, and the English version of Wikipedia contains more than 600,000 entries!
• everything on the web is free - unfortunately, not true! There are many things on the web that cost money, so be careful as you're surfing around!
• the web is an information superhighway - well, sort of. The problem is, like all highways, some turn into dead ends, some take you in a direction that isn't the most productive given the destination that you have planned, and only a few really go in the direction in which you need to head. Be careful of sidetracks and detours!
• the web is full of useless junk - actually, this one is sort of true! Which leads us to the next myth...
• everything on the web is high quality - not a chance! But there are ways that you can judge the quality of web resources, just like print resources. So you can avoid being tricked by non-quality web resources!

Here's the WONDERFUL resource for you to go to and learn about evaluating web pages. It's the University of California, Berkley's tutorial entitled Finding Information on the Internet. While the entire tutorial is excellent, make sure you at least visit this section Evaluating web pages: Techniques to apply & questions to ask. This is a well-documented site that contains relevant and comprehensive information about evaluating web resources. The time that you spend on this site will give you a jump-start for all the web surfing that you'll soon be doing in all your courses!

Some Additional Resources

The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly: Or, why it's a good idea to evaluate web resources - written by a librarian at New Mexico State University. The sections on criteria and examples may be most useful.

Evaluating Information on the Web - written by another librarian. Contains much of the information from the above reference, but stated in a different way in terms of answering the questions who, what, when, where, and why.

Evaluating Health Information on the Web - published by cancercare.org. Some helpful tips, particularly for evaluating health information on the web.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. || Contact Cynthia Russell with questions or comments. || Return to the informatics WebQuest homepage.