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Information About 
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Evaluating Web Sites
Introduction
Anyone can post anything to the Web at any time. The only real restriction to what can be posted is federal copyright law, which protects the rights of owners from seeing their material used without compensation; besides that limitation, anything goes.
Web Sites Can Be Good Sources:
Some sites are from authoritative sources, for example: The Health Consequences of Smoking: A Report of the Surgeon General
Some sites are comprehensive, for example: cancer.gov and cancer.com
Some sites are very current, for example: The New York Times and FindLaw: Legal News and Commentary
Some sites clearly acknowledge their biases, for example: NARAL Pro-Choice America and Operation Save America
The Web is available 24 hours a day, and many sites are free
Web Sites Can Be Bad Sources:
Some sites are of low quality, for example: Steroids and Presidents Graves Home Page
Some sites do not acknowledge their commercial interests, for example: Melatonin.com and AIM: Alcohol in Moderation
Some sites do not acknowledge their allegiances, for example: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research , The Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment, The Heritage Foundation, The Pacific Legal Foundation, RU486Facts.org, and The RU486 Files
Some sites are of questionable scholarship, for example: Did Six Million Really Die from the Institute for Historical Review and Martin Luther King Jr. - A True Historical Examination from Stormfront
Some sites are simply hoaxes, for example: RYT Hospital-Dwayne Medical Center, The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, Dog Island, and Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
Evaluation Criteria
Some commonly accepted criteria used to evaluate sources include:
Accuracy: "exact, precise, correct, as the result of care" -- does the site misstate or misrepresent facts? does the site contain errors?
Authority: "an expert" -- who created the site and what are their affiliations and credentials?
Bias: "to incline to one side" -- does the site offer a point of view or opinion?
Coverage: "the extent of reporting" -- how much information is there?
Currency: "in progress" -- when was the site last updated? how new is the information?
Evaluate sites based on these criteria. Do not use sites that fail your evaluation: there are plenty of other good sites you can use. Consider searching the Internet Public Library and the Librarians’ Internet Index.
Web Site Domains
Domains do not guarantee the quality or integrity of a site. For example, the personal page of a professor or college student could be in the .edu
domain, but that relationship does not validate what the person says. Sometimes, such sites have a tilde ~ in their address.
These web site domains are restricted, only certain organizations can use them: .aero, .coop, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, & .museum
These web site domains are unrestricted, anyone can use them: .biz, .com, .info, .name, .net, .org, & .pro
More Information
Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask (UC Berkeley)
Evaluating Information Sources (Purdue)
Five criteria for evaluating Web pages (Cornell)
Evaluating Websites (Lake Forest College Library)
Google's Web Site Evaluation page
Peter J. Cayan Library, P.O. Box 3050, Utica, NY 13504
Telephone: 315-792-7245 ~ ~ Fax: 315-792-7517
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