Reading Popular Sources

Robin Jeffrey and Amanda Lloyd

What is a Popular Source?

When we say that a source is “popular,” it does not necessarily mean “well liked.”

Popular sources are articles that are written for a general audience. These sources are published so that members of the general public can access, read, and understand the content. There is little jargon or highly specific or technical vocabulary.

Sometimes popular sources are freely available to the public, and sometimes the content is available only with a paid subscription.

Popular sources include newspaper articles, magazine articles, websites, webpages, letters to the editor, blog posts, and more.

Reading Newspaper Articles, Magazine Articles, and Website Articles

“Fake news!” “Media bias!” “Conspiracy theory!”

We hear charges like these often, mostly in reference to the types of popular sources that we can find on the internet, on TV, on the radio, or in print.

These forms of misinformation and disinformation are particularly prevalent on digital platforms where they’re often likely to spread faster than factual reporting. The difference between misinformation and disinformation is a matter of intent: misinformation is simply inaccurate information, whereas disinformation is intentionally misleading.

We’re susceptible to believing and sharing misinformation and disinformation because we tend to unconsciously accept ideas that confirm our worldview, a cognitive process known as confirmation bias.

We should not be tempted to write off all popular sources as somehow “bad.” We should, however, be willing to evaluate any popular source’s authority and credibility before choosing to accept its validity or choosing to include it in an academic assignment.

Lateral Reading

When evaluating the credibility of a digital source, fact checkers will employ lateral reading techniques. Lateral reading helps you to verify sources while you’re reading them. Lateral readers open another web-browser tab and visit a trusted website (like Wikipedia) to determine the validity of a source they’re currently reading.

Evaluating Sources

Determining Trustworthiness

Lumen Learning

To determine the trustworthiness of a source, you want to ensure that a source is current, written by an expert, accurate, and unbiased. You’ll want to consider the rhetorical context of a source, including its purpose, audience, and focus.

One excellent tool to examine both the reliability and trustworthiness of a source is the C.R.A.A.P method, which stands for:

• Currency: The timeliness of the information

• Relevance: The importance of the information for your needs

• Authority: The source of the information

• Accuracy: The reliability, truthfulness, and correctness of the information

• Purpose: The reason the information exists

Sources should always be evaluated relative to your purpose. But because there often aren’t clear-cut answers when you evaluate sources, most of the time it requires you to make inferences–educated guesses from available clues–about whether to use information from particular sources.

The CRAAP Method

Lumen Learning

Currency: The timeliness of the information

Key Question: When was the item of information published or produced?

Determining when information was published or produced is key to evaluating its relevance. The publication date helps assess its currency—how recent it is or how closely it aligns with your topic’s time period.

There are two aspects to consider:

1. Is this the most recent version?

2. Is this the original research, description, or account?

The importance of these factors depends on your research.

Example: Currency

• If you are researching car crash survival rates, you need the latest data on crash tests, materials, and mortality statistics.

• If you are studying college students’ views on the Vietnam War in the 1960s, you need primary sources from that time (e.g., student writings) and possibly secondary sources analyzing that era.

Key indicators of a source’s currency include:

• date of copyright

• date of publication

• date of revision or edition

• dates of sources cited

• date of patent or trademark

Relevance: The importance of the information for your needs

Key Question: How does this source contribute to my research paper?

Suitability is essentially the same as relevance. When evaluating a source, consider how well it supports your argument and how you’ll use it in your paper. You should also consider whether the source provides sufficient coverage of the topic. 

• Information sources with broad, shallow coverage mean that you need to find other sources of information to obtain adequate details about your topic.

• Information sources with a very narrow focus or a distinct bias mean that you need to find additional sources to obtain information on other aspects of your topic.

Some questions to consider are:

• Does the information relate to my topic or answer my question?

• Who is the intended audience?

• Is the information at an appropriate level (i.e. not too simple or advanced) for my needs?

• Did I look at a variety of sources before deciding to use this one?

• Would I be comfortable using this source for my college research paper?

Authority: The source of the information

Key Question: Is the person, organization, or institution responsible for the intellectual content of the information knowledgeable in that subject?

Assessing an author’s knowledge and expertise is key to evaluating a source’s reliability. Anyone can make a claim about some thing, event, or idea, but only someone who knows or understands what that thing, event, or idea is can make a reasonably reliable statement or assertion about it. Some external indications of knowledge of or expertise are:

• a formal academic degree in a subject area

• professional or work-related experience–businessmen, government agency personnel, sports figures, etc. have expertise in their area of work

• active involvement in a subject or organization by serious amateurs who spend substantial amounts of personal time researching and studying that subject area.

• organizations, agencies, institutions, and corporations with active involvement or work in a particular subject area.

PRO TIP: Be careful of opinions stated by professionals outside of their area of work expertise.

Example: Authority

If a cardiologist with years of medical training writes an article on heart disease, you could consider it a reliable source. Meanwhile, if a celebrity shares their thoughts on heart health in a magazine interview, it would likely not be considered a reliable source. The doctor’s expertise gives their information more credibility.

Accuracy: The reliability, truthfulness, and correctness of the information

Key Question: How free from error is this piece of information?

Establishing the accuracy, or relative accuracy, of information is an important part of evaluating a source’s reliability. Facts are easier to verify than opinions, interpretations, or ideas.  The more an idea deviates from widely accepted views, the harder it is to confirm—though it may still be accurate. In such cases, corroboration becomes both more necessary and more difficult. An important aspect of accuracy is the intellectual integrity of the item.

• Are the sources appropriately cited in the text and listed in the references?

• Are quotations cited correctly and in context? Out of context quotations can be misleading and sometimes completely erroneous.

• Are there exaggerations, omissions, or errors? These are difficult to identify if you use only one source of information. Always use several different sources of information on your topic. Analyzing what different sources say about a topic is one way to understand that topic.

In addition to errors of fact and integrity, you need to watch for errors of logic. Errors of logic occur primarily in the presentation of conclusions, opinions, interpretations, editorials, ideas, etc. Some indications that the information is accurate are:

• the same information can be found in other reliable sources

• the experiment can be replicated and returns the same results

• the documentation provided in support of the information is substantive

• the sources used for documentation are known to be generally reliable

• the author of the information is known to have expertise in that subject

• the presentation is free from logical fallacies or errors

• quotations are “in context”-the meaning of the original work is kept in the work which quotes the original

• quotations are correctly cited

• acronyms are clearly defined at the beginning

Some indications that information may not be accurate are:

• facts cannot be verified or are contradicted in other sources

• sources used are known to be unreliable or highly biased

• bibliography of sources used is inadequate or nonexistent

• quotations are taken out of context and given a different meaning

• acronyms are not defined and the intended audience is a general one

• presence of one or more logical fallacies

• authority cited is another part of the same organization

Purpose: The reason the information exists

Key Question: Who is this information written for or is this product developed for?

Identifying a source’s intended audience helps determine its relevance, reliability, and level of detail. The audience influences the style, technical complexity, and depth of coverage.

Example: Impact of the audience

For example, books on food sanitation will differ significantly based on whether they are written for children, restaurant workers, or microbiologists, despite covering the same topic.

Also, consider the author’s objectivity—are they trying to persuade? Do they present bias? While it is unlikely that anything humans do is ever absolutely objective, it is important to establish that the information you intend to use is reasonably objective, or if it is not, to establish exactly what the point of view or bias is. There are times when information expressing a particular point of view or bias is useful, but you must use it consciously. You must know what the point of view is and why that point of view is important to your project.

Determining the intended audience of a particular piece of information will help you decide whether or not the information will be too basic, too technical, too general, or just right for your needs. The intended audience can also indicate the potential reliability of the item because some audiences require more documentation than others.

Example: Intended Audience

For example, items produced for scholarly or professional audiences are generally produced by experts and go through a peer evaluation process. Items produced for the mass market frequently are not produced by experts and generally do not go through an evaluation process.

Some indications of the intended audience are:

• highly technical language, complex analysis, and very sophisticated/technical tools can indicate a technical, professional, or scholarly audience

• how-to information or current practices in “X” are frequently written by experts for practitioners in that field

• substantive and serious presentations of a topic with not too much technical language are generally written for the educated lay audience

• popular language, fairly simple presentations of a topic, little or no analysis, and inexpensive tools can indicate a general or popular audience

• bibliographies, especially long bibliographies, are generally compiled by and for those doing research on that topic