The Critical Evaluation of Bibliographic Web Sources

With the rapid increase in information freely and easily accessible on the web to those who have access to a computer and the internet, there seems to be a corresponding decrease in critical evaluation of the sources of this information. All sources are taken to be sources of information and seem to be uncritically considered to contain reliable, credible, and authoritative information, which is relevant to any topic. However, many sources contain disputed and disputable information slanted to support one ideological belief over another. People use sources in their research bibliographies that are concurrently used to support claims in their research papers that are not in fact plausible. Students, as citizens, need to be critically informed to make good decisions in a democratic society that depends on their reliable, credible and authoritative sources of information used in decision making. In this article, the author offers a set of testing conditions to determine how to critically separate the acceptable sources from the implausible ones.