However, if the source is too relevant to your topic that you cannot use another, use a different evaluation skill to argue for why you are using it, rather than simply arguing that the source is unreliable. Based upon what you discovered in your analysis of the source, you can establish its unreliability based upon any of the following:.
T he creator of the source was not present at the time of the event. The source has not been fact-checked by an educated audience. Demonstrating source reliability in your writing:. This source is mostly reliable regarding factory conditions in the Industrial Revolution because the creator lived next to a major industrial facility during the 19 th century.
As a result, the information provided can be considered very reliable. Demonstrating source unreliability in your writing:. The information is drawn from a random website that does not provide information about the author, so it is probably a very unreliable source.
As you become more comfortable with evaluating the reliability of sources, you will notice that all sources have limitations, even if they are mostly trustworthy. To achieve your best marks in evaluating reliability, you need to demonstrate a sophisticated evaluation of historical sources by providing both reasons FOR trusting a source, and also some reasons AGAINST trusting the source. These are sometimes called the ' values ' and ' limitations ' of a source.
Please remember, that even though you are providing positives and negatives about the reliability of a source, you still need to come to a judgment about how reliable it is, despite its values and limitations. Each of the examples below demonstrate sophisticated evaluation of reliability by identifying some values and limitations of sources, while still drawing a clear judgment about its trustworthiness. Demonstrating a sophisticated evaluation of reliability in your writing:.
Plutarch wrote his biography of Julius Caesar over a century after the events he describes , which calls into question the accuracy of the details he provides. However, he drew upon a number of personal documents written by Caesar himself , which increases the trustworthiness of his account.
Therefore, despite the concern about the date of its creation, this source is still quite a reliable source about the life of Julius Caesar. While Miller has a PhD , which seems to indicate that his interpretation can be trusted, it is worth noting that his post-graduate qualifications are in the field of Biology, not in Modern History , which is the topic he was discussing.
As a result, Miller is not a very reliable source of information about the rise of Soviet Russia. Goethe's personal diary is a valuable record of his beliefs and honest thought s about the rise of the Nazi party in the s, as he consistently wrote his entries at the end of each day.
It must be noted that he was a devoted member of Hitler's inner circle , and due to that fact, his writing only contains the uncritical reproduction of Nazi propaganda from the time. This significantly decreases the likelihood of it being a trustworthy account of what really occurred at the time.
No personal information is collected as part of this quiz. Only the selected responses to the questions are recorded. Contact via email. Key Question 2. Background Research 3. Sub-questions 4. Source Research 5. Organise Quotes 6. Topic Sentences 7. Magazine articles, books and newspaper articles from well-established newspapers - written for a general audience by authors or journalists who have consulted reliable sources and vetted through an editor.
These sources may provide some of their articles online for free. It is important to be able to distinguish between them! Beware of sources on the internet that look like reputable magazines, and newspapers, but don't have reliable content. Websites and blogs - can be reliable or unreliable, hoaxes or sincere misinformation.
Researchers and other experts often use blogs as a way to share their knowledge with the general public, but anyone with computer access can do so too, to further any agenda they want. It's up to you to evaluate the quality of what you find online. Online news sources are particularly notorious for false information.
Wikipedia - some entries are reliable, some are not - it's up to you to evaluate. The authors are anonymous, so there's no way to determine their expertise, or the expertise of the Wikipedia editor who oversees the entry. Instead, its category depends on how you treat it, which in turn depends on your research question. For example, Black Reconstruction in America , written in by W. Du Bois, could be used as a secondary source for research about 19th-century America, since Du Bois draws on a range of government reports, biographies, and existing historical narratives in order to make a claim about the past.
One of the main challenges of dealing with primary sources is locating them. Many historical documents have never been published, and they may only be available in archives. For example, here is a page from the expense book of a student enrolled in the University of Illinois in It is a unique document located in the Student Life and Culture Archive here on campus, and it is only accessible to those who can come to the archive in person.
This, on the other hand, is a published primary source: a diary, written in , and first published several decades later. Our copy is in the Main Stacks. Some of these materials, like letters, were not published at the time of creation, but have been subsequently published in a book, or digitized and made available online. For some topics, historical documents might be difficult to find because they have been lost or were never created in the first place.
In other cases, the primary sources might exist, but not in English. Therefore, when you begin to formulate a topic, you will want to think about what kinds of evidence will be available to you.
When thinking about how to find or make sense of primary sources, you should ask yourself three questions:. For example, if you are interested in the issue of birth control in 20 th century America, you can expect to find many primary sources, including:. If you are interested in a topic from a more distant historical time period, such as the status of Jews during the Renaissance, you may have to look harder, but you can still find documents such as:.
Were they created at the time of the events they recount, or were they written many years later?
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