How to Evaluate Sources

Evaluating the Timeliness and Comprehensiveness of a Scholarly or Professional Journal Article

Both timeliness and comprehensiveness of your sources are important in research writing projects. In this demonstration, we'll again follow student writer Anthony Gomez as he evaluates an article from the scholarly journal Language and Learning Across the Disciplines. The article, "Learning at the Edges: Challenges to the Sustainability of Service Learning in Higher Education," was published in October 2000 and is available as an Acrobat document.

The importance of timeliness—when a source was published—varies according to your research writing situation. In most cases, you should strive to use the most current sources possible. Use older materials only when their value has held up over time or if your research focuses on a particular period earlier than the recent past. Comprehensiveness refers to the extent to which a source provides a complete and balanced view of a topic. The importance of comprehensiveness varies according to the specific demands of your research writing situation.

The Language and Learning Across the Disciplines article we are looking at was published in October 2000. In addition, as you can see below, the majority of sources the authors refer to in the references list are either fairly current or are landmarks in their respective fields.

Many of the publications the authors used in the article were published shortly before the article was written.

Other works, such as Experience in Education by Dewey and Vygotsky's Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, were published much earlier but are landmarks in their field.

Most articles in scholarly or professional journals tend to be written for audiences with a highly focused interest in a particular area. The authors of these articles assume their readers are knowledgeable about that area and, as a result, often use specialized terms without providing definitions. Authors of these articles also assume readers are familiar with the particular research methods used in a given field. As a result, articles in many scholarly and professional journals can be difficult for a non-specialist to understand. Their potential difficulty, however, makes them no more or less worthy of evaluation—and, in fact, the careful editorial review process typically undergone by contributors to scholarly and professional journals helps ensure their reliability and credibility.

As you determine the comprehensiveness of your source, ask yourself the following questions:

• How specialized is the information in the source?
• Does the source provide a broad overview of an issue?
• Does it focus on a narrow topic using highly specialized jargon?
• Will your audience be able to understand key terms from the source?
• Do you understand the key ideas in the source?

The Language and Learning Across the Disciplines article used by student writer Anthony Gomez is an interdisciplinary source for an audience of those interested in "situated discourse communities and writing across the curriculum programs." As Anthony found, the language was not too specialized for him to grasp the first time he read it.