Chapter 5: Finding and Evaluating Sources

Match sources to claims and evaluate disagreement by comparing methods, scope, and the evidence each source supplies.

What You Will Make

Build an evidence matrix containing each source’s bibliographic details, relevant claim, locator, method, limitation, and intended use. Follow course rules about acceptable sources and research methods.

Search with a Question in Mind

Turn the question into two or three concepts and list alternative terms. Use your library’s catalogue and relevant databases, examine abstracts for fit, and follow references from useful work. Search results help locate sources; they do not verify the underlying claims.

Read the material you will cite. Check the author, publication, version, date, method, and the passage supporting your intended sentence. If you know a source only through another writer, do not describe it as directly inspected.

Fictional teaching case: This lesson uses the invented campus-transit records in Chapter 1. Record labels and numbers are practice material, not real research to cite or submit.

Compare Fit Rather Than Prestige

Record A can support a boarding count. Record B can support a scheduled departure time. Record C can describe what twenty volunteers reported. The timetable may be more useful than the survey for identifying the published departure, while the survey reveals a reported difficulty that the timetable alone does not describe.

These records do not necessarily contradict one another: more trips can occur while some late classes remain poorly served. Choosing only the source with the most favourable result would distort the question.

Try It Yourself

For two real sources, record the exact question each addresses. Compare the period, population, definitions, and method before deciding whether they disagree. Add a column labelled what this cannot establish.

Practice entry: “Record C, method and item 3 → use for a reported late-class problem among volunteers; do not use to estimate the percentage of all students affected.” A real entry needs the real source’s title, author, locator, and access details.

Check Your Work

Did you inspect the source rather than rely on a generated or search summary?
Does its method bear on the claim you intend to make?
Have you retained relevant inconvenient evidence?
Can you explain apparent disagreements without flattening their differences?

If a central source cannot be verified, find another evidentiary route or narrow the claim.