How to Evaluate Websites

How to Evaluate Websites

• Credibility
• Follow-Through (Contact Information)
• Timeliness
• Authority
• Accuracy
• Has this material been printed in paper form?
• Other Web Evaluation Pages and Resources

Credibility

• Who assembled the site? 
• What is their organizational affiliation? Does their affiliation indicate the possibility of bias?
• What scholarly or professional credentials do they have that would indicate that the information they present is accurate, or that their opinions on the subject are worthwhile?  

• Know the meanings of the domain designations:

• .com:  commercial, hosted by a company

• .org:  non-profit organization

• .mil:  military branch of the government

• .net:  usually an internet service provider

• .gov:  governmental website 

• .edu:  educational institution

For other domain designations, please see the Network Solutions website.

Information found on educational or governmental web sites will probably be the most reliable.  Be careful of information from commercial or non-profit organizations; they frequently have a bias.  

• If it is a commercial site or a non-profit organization, is their purpose or bias easily determined?  

Follow-Through (Contact Information)

• Is there an address at which the Web author may be contacted? This should be included on the site.
• Is there an e-mail link?  Authors who do not give the reader a way to contact them somewhere on the site may be avoiding confrontations or hiding something.

Timeliness

• When was the site last updated? The amount of updating necessary for accuracy varies by subject, but if a site has not been touched up by its author in the past year, this could signal trouble.  The exceptions are index pages or pages that serve as a table of contents to the site.
  

Authority

• If the site includes information gathered from other resources, is it properly attributed, or is it listed without its source?  This can include a bibliography of books or articles, much as a printed paper.

Accuracy

• Is the information presented factual?  Can you find any errors?  Often, a comparison to printed information or other sites of known reliability will give you an idea as to whether the information is accurate.  One good title to use for statistical information is the Statistical Abstract of the United States.  Sources for statistical information online can be found at  FedStats. 
• Has the information been altered from its original form?  It's easy to download a table from another website and make changes in the figures.
• Does the author support the information with evidence?

Has this material been printed in paper form?   

• If so, by whom? Materials that have also gone through the standard publishing process are more likely to have been checked for accuracy.

Remember:  Anyone with Internet access can put together a Web page. Use your judgment when using the Internet for your research.

Other Web Evaluation Pages and Resources

• Sources of Reliable Web Sites

• Evaluating Websites is a SNAP!

• Evaluating Information on the Internet  (Johns Hopkins University)

• Web Evaluation (UCLA)