The Bedford Researcher, Chapter five

            In this chapter, it is all about evaluating your sources. The first question you want to ask yourself is what factor should I use to evaluate a source? The Bedford Researcher answers evaluating a source means examining its relevance, evidence, author, publisher, timeliness, comprehensiveness, and genre. Throughout this chapter it talks in depth about these subheadings. Starting with relevance, which means to determine if the info in a source will help you address your readers needs, interest, values, and beliefs.  Evidence, is self explained, but the book says it is info offered to support an author’s reasoning about an issue. Next, is evaluating the author, which means to ask if the author is knowledgeable about your topic, and their affiliation. Evaluating the publisher is next on the list, which says, you want to locate info about the publisher and their biases affect the info, ideas, and arguments in the source. Evaluating timeliness means, a source’s publication date. Evaluating comprehensiveness is the extent to which a source provides a complete and balanced view of a topic. This also varies according to the demands of your writing situation. Last evaluation is about genre. Identifying the genre or document type of the sources you are evaluating can help you understand a great deal about its intended readers and the kind of argument it is likely to make. The last part of this chapter also explains to evaluate web sources for relevance and credibility.