Critical appraisal of information
Level 3 teaches you how to select reliable and relevant information for your paper. You will learn the following:
- how to determine the reliability of information
- how to select information relevant to your content
Determining reliability
Now let us look at how you can judge the reliability of information. You will be introduced to several types of information that have different levels of reliability.
Exercise 1
Go to the exercise and answer the questions about purpose, audience and reliability of different information types.
When you have completed the exercise, you will know that not all information is equally reliable. The origin of the information determines its reliability.
It is important that you can judge the reliability of the information that you retrieved using your smart search strategy.
Take a good look again at Swanson’s table
with an overview of information types, their audience and their purpose. The table can help you assess the reliability of information
Determining relevance
Now let us take a look at how to select information relevant to the content of your paper. The authors of the scientific article in Level 1 have used information to substantiate the claims in their article. The information used should be relevant; it should be related to the search topic.
Exercise 2
The following exercise teaches you how to select relevant information. Go to the exercise and answer the questions. When you have done the exercise, you will know that it is important to use information relevant to your content to substantiate your paper.
Continue to Level 4