Authority
Who is the author?
Is he/she an expert in the field?
What is his/her credentials?
What is his/her institutional and professional affiliations?
Who is the publisher?
Are they known for scholarly publications?
Objectivity
Are the goals of the work clearly stated?
Are authoritative sources cited?
Are arguments and conclusions supported by evidence?
Accuracy
Are sources for factual information clearly stated and can be verified?
Is the information free of grammatical, spelling, or typographical errors?
Is the information peer reviewed?
Is the author's methodology presented?
Reliability and Credibility
Is the information valid and well reserached?
Is the information presented still valid and applicable today?
Does the information have a complete list of references from authoritative sources?
Are quotes and other strong assertions supported by sources that can be easily located?
Currency
Is the information up to date?
When was the information published?
Has it been updated since the first publication?
If its information on the web, does links work?
There is a proliferation of information especially on the World Wide Web. As such, it is imperative that users are able to evaluate these resources to ascertain suitable information for their research needs. The video below provides a guide on how to evaluate information resources.
Turnitin is an Internet-based plagiarsm prevention service created by iParadigms, LLC. Usually, universities including the UWI subscribe to the software which enables students to run papers to the Turnitin website, which checks the documents for unoriginal content.
PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. It is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help students improve their writing by checking for plagiarism.
Plagium is a free online multilingual plagiarism tracker that allows you to check whether a content from your website or research paper has been copied and used anywhere else.
It is a free plagiarism detection software which helps in improving the originality of your content of plagiarism and make it original. Each sentence is dissected, and all the source websites from where the content was copied are displayed.
Checks your papers for plagiarism but is limited to 1500 words per search.