10.4 Evaluating Sources

Evaluating your sources is critical to the process of research. When you write for business and industry you will want to draw on reputable, reliable sources—printed as well as electronic ones—because they reflect on the credibility of the message and the messenger. A question that is central to your assessment of your sources is how credible the source is. This question is difficult to address even with years of training and expertise. Sarah Blakeslee and the librarians at California State University, Chico, came up with the CRAAP Test to help researchers easily determine whether a source is trustworthy. Activity 10.1 explains the important questions to ask when evaluating sources using the CRAAP Test.

^{Activity 10.1 | The CRAAP Test}

If you’ve found a source that fails a few criteria on the CRAAP Test, you don’t necessarily have to throw the source away. Instead, see if you can find other, more reliable sources to corroborate what your source tells you.

Want to learn more?

Watch the video below from McMaster Libraries on How Library Stuff Works: How to Evaluate Resources (the CRAAP Test) to learn more about the CRAAP test.