Use the P.R.O.V.E.N. Source Evaluation Process to help you determine whether the sources you find are credible and appropriate choices for your particular research purpose. The questions below will help you think critically during the source evaluation process:
Caulfield, Mike. "Four Moves and a Habit." Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, 2017.
P.R.O.V.E.N. Source Evaluation by Ellen Carey (6/18/18) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A link or url tells you quite a bit about where the information on the page comes from and who the intended audience is. The last three letters of a url (uniform resource locator) or link will tell you a great deal about who owns a website, who writes the content and what their purpose is. To find out more about a website, check it on Whois.
Top-level domain |
Abbreviation for: |
Who uses it | Url of example website |
.com |
commercial | commercial entities | https://www.amazon.com/ |
.edu |
education | universities and colleges | https://www.berkeley.edu/ |
.gov |
government | U.S. government | https://www.usgs.gov/ |
.net |
network | network infrastructure | https://www.slideshare.net/ |
.org |
organization | nonprofit organizations | https://www.sierraclub.org/ |
.mil |
military | U.S. military | https://www.marines.mil/ |
Compare these three websites about space and astronomy.
Link | Purpose | Reliability | Objectivity | Verifiability | Expertise | Newness |
ScienceNews.org | ||||||
Space.com | ||||||
Nasa.gov |
Click on each link to discover who the author is and run it through the P.R.O.V.E.N. test.
Link (find domain name) | Purpose | Reliability | Objectivity | Verifiability | Expertise | Newness |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A link to a website | ||||||
Another link | ||||||
Also a link | ||||||
Here's another | ||||||
And finally |