How to Evaluate Sources

Evaluating the Relevance of a Magazine or Newspaper Article

Relevance is the extent to which a source provides information you can use in your research writing project. There are several ways to determine whether the information presented in a magazine or newspaper article is likely to be relevant to your project.

For purposes of this demonstration, we'll follow the progress of student writer Aaron Batty as he evaluates an article from the news source BBC News to decide whether to use it as a source in his research writing project.

The first step in evaluating the relevance of a magazine or newspaper article is to quickly scan the article, reading bold-faced, colored, or underlined text; the first and last sentences of paragraphs; pull-quotes (highlighted quotations); photo captions; illustrations; and tables. Key ideas are often highlighted in some way on the page or are located at the beginning and ends of a paragraph. In addition, many magazine editors introduce the major ideas in a short sentence directly following the article title.

As you can see below, the BBC News article "Dilemma for China" includes photos, photo captions, and headings, and the first two sentences of the article serve as an introduction. Because Aaron's essay is about the relations between China and Taiwan, especially in light of recent events (at the time he was writing his project), he quickly determined that this article was at least superficially relevant to his search and deserved further investigation.

His next step was to evaluate its relevance in greater depth. He read the entire article and asked himself whether the information it presented would help him accomplish his purposes as a writer. Because part of Aaron's goal in researching his topic was to find a variety of sources that discussed current and historical relations between China and Taiwan, he decided that this source was relevant to his project, and moved on to examining the evidence it presented.

Click on the Continue button to view a demonstration of evaluating the evidence used in the article.