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Authority: Critical Evaluation

This guide will help you better understand authority in the context of research and information and provide you with methods of evaluating an information source to determine its authority.
Last Updated: Jan 8, 2024 3:31 PM

Critical Evaluation of Information Sources

After initial evaluation of a source, the next step is to go deeper. This includes a wide variety of techniques and may depend on the type of source. In the case of research, it will include evaluating the methodology used in the study and requires you to have knowledge of those discipline-specific methods. If you are just beginning your academic career or just entered a new field, you will likely need to learn more about the methodologies used in order to fully understand and evaluate this part of a study.

Lateral reading is a technique that can, and should, be applied to any source type. In the case of a research study, looking for the older articles that influenced the one you selected can give you a better understanding of the issues and context. Reading articles that were published after can give you an idea of how scholars are pushing that research to the next step. This can also help with understanding how scholars engage with each other in conversation through research and even how the academic system privileges certain voices and established authorities in the conversation. You might find articles that respond directly to studies that provide insight into evaluation and critique within that discipline.

Evaluation at this level is central to developing a better understanding of your own research question by learning from these scholarly conversations and how authority is tested.

Check out the resources below to help you with this stage of evaluation.

 

Scientific Method/Methodologies

Here is a general overview of how the scientific method works and how scholars evaluate their work using critical thinking. This same process is used when scholars write up their scholarly work. 

The Steps of the Scientific Method

  1. Question something that was observed

  2. Do background research to better understand

  3. Formulate a hypothesis (research question)

  4. Create an experiment or method for studying the question

  5. Run the experiment and record the results

  6. Think critically about what the results mean

  7. Suggest conclusions and report back

Lateral Reading

Critical Thinking

Thinking critically about the information you encounter is central to how you develop your own conclusions, judgement, and position. This analysis is what will allow you to make a valuable contribution of your own to the scholarly conversation.

Scholarship as Conversation

Retraction

It sounds pretty bad if you say an article was retracted, but is it always? As with most things, it depends on the context. Someone retracting a statement made based on false information or misinformation is one thing. It happens fairly often in the case of social media--removed tweets or Instagram posts for example.

In scholarship, there are a number of reasons an article might be retracted. These range from errors in the methods used, experiment structure, data, etc. to issues of fraud or misrepresentation. Central to scholarship is the community of scholars actively participating in the scholarly conversation even after the peer review process. Careful analysis of published research by other scholars is vital to course correction.

In science research, it's a central part of the process! An inherent part of discovery is basing conclusions on the information at hand and repeating the process to gather more information. If further research is done that provides new information and insight, that might mean an older conclusion gets corrected. Uncertainty is unsettling, but trust in the process means understanding the important role of retraction.