Search for contact information such as a name, e-mail address, or institution.
Search for the author's credentials:
- Is the author affiliated with a university, organization, institution, or association?
- Search for the author's name in a library database such as Academic Search Complete or WorldCat to find out about whether or not the author has other publications.
- Search the author's name on Google. Is he or she listed as author of other Web publications? Is there an organization, publisher, or corporate author listed? Who is producing or sponsoring the site? A university? A government agency? An organization? Is the organization profit or nonprofit? Do you see a university or corporate logo? Is the site someone's personal Web page?
For a Web site, look at the site's address. Is the top-level domain .edu, .gov, or .org? These domains indicate that the source is an educational, government, or non-profit institution and may indicate higher reliability, but this does not automatically make it an authoritative or reliable source.
- If you cannot tell anything about the producer of the site from the page you are on, delete part of the Web address after the main address or first forward slash (/). This will take you to the home page of the site. From there you may be able to find out who is sponsoring it.
- Many Web sources do not give the identity or credentials of the author or producer. Sources that do not give this information have questionable reliability.
Check a biographical source:
- There will be many times during your years in college and later in life that you will need to find biographical information about a person. The library has dozens of biographical sources in the reference area. A researcher often doesn't know which one will contain information on the person of interest. Some basic sources to try are the following:
- Articles: Find articles in databases such as: Literature Resource Center or Academic Search Complete.
- Encyclopedia articles: Look in general or specialized encyclopedias for a brief summary of an author's life. Use the library catalog to find both print and online encyclopedias.
- Books: Do a subject search in library catalog to find print and online books that detail a person's life.
Read a critical review:
- Book Reviews: A review is a critical evaluation which will often provide information about the author. By reading reviews, you can determine the quality of a book or movie.Books are reviewed in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. Ordinarily a book will be reviewed within a year after it is published, although it may be reviewed later. You can limit your search to book reviews in the EBSCOhost databases such as Academic Search Complete.