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Business History: Evaluating Search Results

URL: http://researchguides.library.yorku.ca/businesshistory

Evaluating Search Results

For each of the items that appears in your search results, brief information about the source will be presented, including an abstract/summary, title, author, date of publication, etc. Consider the following to help you decide which items to review in more detail:

 

         Relevance: look at the title of the source. Does it appear to be on topic?

         Format: is the source in the format you need? Is it a book? A scholarly or peer-reviewed article? Many databases provide options that allow you to limit to a particular format.  


         Year of publication: what is the date of publication? Is it important to have the most current information? Do you need information from a particular historical period? Many databases provide the option to sort your results by date or to limit results to particular years.

Is it good information? Or is it CRAAP?

Do not take everything you read for its face value, always apply the CRAAP/PARCA test.

Currency: How current is the resource?

Relevance: Does the resource meet your needs?

Authority: Who wrote/produced/published the resource?

Accuracy: Is the information in the resource reliable?

Purpose: Why does this resource exist?