How to Know If a Source is Reliable, a la Shmoop. Meet Maria. She’s always cutting corners. When she encounters a young man selling supposedly brand-name purses out of the trunk of his car, she thinks she’s found the best deal ever… …until, that is, Maria discovers the Burberry handbag she covets is actually made by Barberry... …in China… …out of plastic. While anyone with half a brain should know that a designer clutch for sale at a street vendor isn’t the real thing… …even the savviest writers sometimes have difficulty discerning whether a source is reliable… …or super shady. So, how do we tell good sources from bad? Well, first off, did we pull our source off the Internet? While websites can provide us with all sorts of marvelous information… …and cat pictures… …the Internet is also rife with gossip and outright lies, which is why we have to be very, very careful when using online sources. If we’re pulling content from the official webpages of the White House, Walmart, or a reputable newspaper like The New York Times… …then the information we’re using is probably safe, given that it’s been uploaded with the full weight of the U.S. government… …the Walton family… …and the liberal media machine behind it. Wikipedia, however, does not make the cut as a reliable source. Anyone… …absolutely anyone… …can log on to Wikipedia and edit articles. Random blog posts with anonymous authors also don’t constitute reliable sources. This brings us to our next criteria for determining reliability. Whether the source we’re interested in is a book, a piece in an academic journal, or an article taken off the Internet, we have to ask: Who’s the author? The author of a reliable source will be respected in his or her field of study… …and will cite his or her sources so we can fact-check to our heart’s content. For example, if we’re writing an essay about President William Howard Taft and his enormous bathtub… …we should look for source materials written by noted historians… …Taft’s family, friends, and other contemporaries… …or maybe even by President Taft himself.

We also need to know when a source was written in order to decide whether it’s reliable or not. Say we’re writing a paper about yellow fever. While medical texts hailing from the era of the building of the Panama Canal might be interesting… …a source penned more than one hundred years ago doesn’t tell us much about where yellow fever is prevalent today, or why… …and what people can do to protect themselves from bleeding all over the furniture. In other words, a reliable source is appropriate to the topic and the time we’re writing about. Here’s another criteria for determining the reliability of a source: What’s the author’s purpose? While some authors set out to provide an objective look at a topic… …others will have an agenda, because they have very strong feelings about the subject… …or perhaps because their research was sponsored by an organization with a particular outlook. It’s our job when searching for sources to identify where the author is coming from, why, and if their viewpoint is reliable enough to include in our own work. For example, say we’re writing a paper on pesticide use in the United States. We find an article written by a biologist who claims that a particular pesticide used on corn doesn’t negatively affect human health… …even though a dozen other biologists in a dozen other academic papers have come to the opposite conclusion. Given how very different Biologist A’s stance is on our pesticide from the rest of the scientific community, it’s of the utmost importance that we determine whether he’s a reliable source or not. In this case, a quick search determines that Biologist A’s study was sponsored by the company that manufactures the pesticide. Sorry, Biologist A, but we vote you off the island. We’ve discussed how reliable sources will have authors who know what they’re talking about… …and who are willing to put their names on their work. Reliable sources will be relevant to our topic… …and will have citations that allow us to check the source’s veracity.

While we can look online for reliable sources, we know to be cautious about what we find on the Internet. One last question: Why does it matter whether we use reliable sources or not? Whether we’re producing a paper for school or for an employer… …we’re putting our names to something. We’re saying that what we’ve written can be relied on. When our own reputations are on the line with our peers, our teachers, or our employers, we must take the extra time… …and really, it isn’t much… …to make sure that the information we use to back our opinions is good. Otherwise, we’ll look like idiots.