The following series of criteria will help you evaluate periodical sources you find. Use these criteria in writing the evaluation of your periodical article of choice for Assignment 3. In order to evaluate your article well, you will have to examine it carefully and read at least representative portions from it.

Remember, when you are evaluating an information source, you are looking at how good that source will be for a given purpose. As a member of this class, you should locate books that would be appropriate to use as sources for college level papers and presentations. The list of questions below will help you identify periodical articles that demonstrate excellent potential as college research material. If you were actually writing a paper or doing a presentation using material gathered for this class, you would also need to read and carefully evaluate the specific content of the articles you would choose to use. You would examine the author's reasoning, his/her use and quality of evidence and other specifics about each text in order to determine whether or not each would serve as a worthy source for your purposes.

Periodical sources can be magazine articles, journal articles and/or newspaper articles. The characeristics of articles found in periodicals are somewhat different from books. In evaluating your chosen article, you will need to look for features unique to periodicals.

Note: Do not compose your periodical source evaluation as direct answers to these questions. Instead, use these questions to ask yourself important points about your source. Then, use what you learn about the article to compose a written evaluation of it. Your written evaluation should make sense to anyone reading it. The reader should not have to look at these guidelines in order to understand your evaluation.

Your source evaluation should be written in complete sentences and should form a paragraph related to the specific source.

1. Type of Source
   • What type of source is it? Is it an article from a popular magazine, a journal, or a newspaper?
2. Narrowness of Subject Coverage
   • How narrow is the topic covered by this article? Does it place your subject in a broader context, or does it offer specific details about certain aspects of your subject? How would the focus of this work support your understanding of your chosen research subject? Explain.
3. Date Published and Effect on Value of Source
   • Can you tell what year the article was published? (Hint: look at the cover or the table of contents of the periodical; or the first page of the article.) Do you think, given the age of the material, there have been changes in written knowledge in this area? (For example, an article from a medical journal from the 1950s would not reflect current medical techniques or thinking.) Is the article current in that field and does this matter for your topic? Given the age of this item, how suitable do you think it would be if you were to use it as a resource for a college paper or presentation? Explain.
4. Audience 
   • Is the article easy to read? Is it so easy to read that it seems below your level of understanding? Is it difficult for you to understand due to the vocabulary used or due to the author's writing style? Considering the article's readability and other factors, who do you think is the audience for this article? Does it seem to be aimed at a scholarly audience, at just about anyone or at some other audience you can identify? Explain.
5. Organization of Content
   • Look at the layout of the article. Is it straightforward with plain headings and few or no illustrations, or does it have graphic headings and colorful or "splashy" illustrations? Is the article divided into sections with an abstract, introduction, and conclusion? Is the text or other material presented organized in any other ways to facilitate use? Is the source too short to need such things? Explain.
6. Presence or Absence of Citations and Effect on Value of Source
   • Does the source contain citations to other sources? If so, does it look like, from the number and type of citations, that the source was itself well-researched? Explain.
   • If your source contains no citations, is there a good reason for this lack? For instance, your source could be a first-hand account of an event. No one has to research an event in order to give his or her personal account as a witness of it. Or, your author may be the very person who invented the process or procedure described in the work. Explain.
7. Credibility of Source
   • Examine each article carefully, and try to determine something about its credibility. Why should you believe this source? Is there anything to tell you the source is reliable? What? Use as many of the questions below as you can to help you examine your articles and to determine their credibility.
     • Is the periodical source a popular magazine, scholarly journal, professional journal, news/opinion magazine or a newspaper? Is the article itself popular, scholarly, professional or news reporting? Does this affect the credibility of the information in the article? 
     • Is the periodical a refereed journal? If you can't find out by looking at the journal itself, look up the journal title in Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory shelved behind the reference desk. This step is required for the journal article you evaluate for assignment 3.
     • Who wrote or produced this source? Can you find out anything about this person to tell you whether or not he/she is an authority in this subject area? Look at the article itself; does it provide any information on the author? Are the author's educational or other credentials listed somewhere in the article? Does the author seem to be an expert or researcher in this field, or is he/she simply reporting on the topic? Explain.