The topic of "the authority of sources" is becoming increasingly interesting as the world grows its reliance on online research. We are encouraged to prefer "authoritative sources" for citing in essays, but I wonder how ungdergraduate students, by definition unfamiliar with the subject, are meant to identify them. As far as I know, Google does not rank its finds by credibility or authority!
We can probably assume that any sources actually referred in our Course Work will be deemed to be authoritative, but what can we do after that? For online sources, can we tell by the font or the styling they use? Doubtful. What about how the sources identify themselves? If there is no author at all apparent, or his/her name is something like "head-kicker", does that make the source less authoritive than an author with a name like Cloyd W. Schingledecker Jnr? I am always impressed when a webpage has a date on it, but I can hardly argue that a date implies authority. Maybe it's the language used itself - more credibility will surely accrue to an author who writes in complete sentences in structured paragraphs, and knows about punctuation and capitalisation. I hypothesise that the more arcane (that's French for highfalutin') the language, the greater the authority.
There's no doubt that peer reveiwed journal articles published by Universities are going to score well in the "authority" stakes, but search engines don't always capture these well. Sometimes we can only get abstracts, often they are incomprehensible to duffers like me. I personally haven't had much joy looking through the online libraries (such as Curtin's), but maybe my searching skills aren't up to scratch, maybe I'm using the wrong keywords. So I tend to rely on Google, and then I take my chances on authority.
Any advice would be most welcome. It will be more highly regarded if it is fully refereed and sourced from Nature, of course.
Some TypoEffect images
11 years ago
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