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[Chinese Year of the Ox]

Evaluating and Citing Web Resources for Research

1. Evaluating Sources

Despite the fact that your tuition and Hong Kong taxpayers' money is spent by the HKUST Library to give you access to reliable and useful and convenient for research, many students still turn to Google or Yahoo to do their research.

Thus, it is very important to learn how to evaluate (judge) material.The criteria usually used to evaluate any source (written or online) are:

  • Who and where - also known as "authority"
  • What - purpose? bias? documentation?
  • When - also known as "currency"

Authority = "Who?"

Questions to ask yourself:
Who wrote it ?
What are the author's credentials?
If it's an organization what type of organization?

Strategies:

Decode the URL
URL stands for "Uniform Resource Locator". It is an "address" for a Web document. It can be broken up into four parts:

http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/2009/index.html

protocol server name domain name path name(s) file name
http:// nobelprize. .org /medicine/laureates/2009/ index.html

Learning to "decode" a URL is helpful for evaluation. Who "sponsors" a document can tell you something about it, just as a publisher of a printed document tells you something.

A domain name can often tell you if it is a government site, an academic site, or a commercial site.

Some common domain name endings are:

.com or .co = a commercial organization (company)
.edu or .ac = an educational organization
.gov = an official government site
.org = mostly non-profit organizations
.net = traditionally it was for network organizations, but now can be used by anyone
.cn = China, .ca = Canada, .hk =Hong Kong, .jp = Japan, .se=Sweden, etc.
This indicates the country where the site is registered

Go to ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)'s section on top-level domain names to learn more.

"Crawl up" the URL
This strategy helps you to learn more about where a page comes from.

Go to the Green Harbours: Hong Kong and Shenzhen and then erase up to the domain name, e.g. http://www. civic-exchange.org.

Look for the information in "about" or "about us" "who we are" "what is"...

This information usually appears:

Check the registration of the page.

"Whois" was originally a UNIX command; but now there are Web sites that allow you to find site owners or administrators.

Examples:

Purpose or Bias = "What?"

Question to ask yourself: - What is the purpose of this site or page? Why was it created?

Is it striving for objectivity?
Does it have an obvious point of view or bias?

Strategies:

  • Look in the "about" section and see if they state an ideology, mission, or purpose.
  • Try to avoid obvious bias if you are trying to report "facts".
  • Check the facts cited on the web site against other sources.
  • If the site carries advertisements, consider what they advertise. Who do the authors consider their audience?

Various reasons pages are created:

Suitability and Documentation = "What?"

Questions to ask yourself:
  • Is this a "scholarly" source (with references and citations) or "popular" source (meant for the average non-expert reader)?
  • Is the topic covered in-depth, or is it given a general or surface treatment?
  • If it does cite other sources - How reliable are they?
  • How up-to-date are the sources?
  • Who is the intended audience: primary school children, secondary students, university level post-graduates?
Example:
You want information on giant squid. If you are a non-expert, this page would be suitable. If you are a marine biologist, this one would be better.

Date of Information = "When?"

Question to ask yourself
How up-to-date is it?

For some material it doesn't matter if it is "old" by internet standards.

This article about keeping an octopus as a pet, was first published in 1994; or these recipes for mantou(饅頭) from 1997 and 2002 are probably not out-dated.

But, this and this are descriptions of the Indonesian economy from ~1999 and may be "old news".

Both come from the first page of results of googling "Indonesian Economy".


Strategies
1. Look for a last revised or updated date, sometimes at the top of the page, and sometimes at the bottom.

2. Look for a last revised date through the browser

Hoaxes, Phishing, and Jokes

Hoaxes and false rumors circulate on the Web quickly and stay in circulation for a long time, sometimes with slight modifications.

Urban Legends Reference Pages (also known as "Snopes") - is a good place to check if you read or hear something that sounds odd.

In recent years, "phishing has become a problem, where email messages try to direct people to fake websites to gain financial information. The Anti-phishing working group has some advice for consumers.

People often will put up fake information, not to intentionally fool people, but to make people laugh. The problem is, sometimes people do not have sufficient knowledge (or skepticism) to see that it's a joke.

Dihydrogen Monoxide hoax
The City Council of Aliso Viejo in California was in the news on March 14, 2004 because it planned to ban cups because they contained the chemical "dihydrogen monoxide". They later blamed it on a paralegal who did faulty research (not themselves who must have forgotten any chemistry they learned in secondary school). The paralegal probably read this site.

April Fool's Joke, 2003
On April 1, 2003 a 14-year-old made a parody of a Ming Pao. stating that Hong Kong had been declared an infected port & that the Hang Seng had collapsed and Tung Chee Hwa had resigned. A lot of people read it and thought it was true. The HKSAR government had to send out over 8 million text messages to say it was a joke.

Google's April Fool's Jokes


Google often makes April Fool's jokes.

Practice Together

In-Class Exercises

More practice is available. Go to this tutorial Internet for Social Research Methods > JUDGE

Summary

Remember:
  • Don't believe everything you read on the Web or anywhere else.
  • Think critically, be skeptical.
  • The best resources for your topic may not be on the Web, especially for in-depth analysis.

2. Citing Web Sources

Why Cite?
  1. To persuade (X is a highly regarded person, if I show that X supports the point I am making, it will persuade the reader)
  2. To embody concepts or methods (rather than describing how to determine a protein, I cite the paper that tells you this, and move with my own addition to knowledge).
  3. To provide credibility (they allow the reader to check the evidence and chain of logic themselves).
  4. To give credit for ideas and show the reader where to go for a further elaboration (citation marks intellectual property)1

The need to cite does not go away on the Web. If you are the author of a web document, or the author of a non-Web document that was researched using Web resources, you still need to cite. The problem just gets a little more difficult.

How to Cite?
There are several common standard formats for citation, found in style guides. Style varies across disciplines. Ask your instructor which style s/he prefers.

In general, web citations should have these elements:
  • Author
  • Date published or last updated
  • Title of page [put in italics or underline unless part of a larger work].
  • Title of larger work [italics or underline ].
  • Date accessed
  • URL of page

Examples:

1. Wood, James B. (1999). Don't Fear the Raptor: An Octopus in the Home Aquarium, last revised Feb. 5, 1999. Retrieved March 30, 2006 from http://is.dal.ca/%7Eceph/TCP/octokeep.html

2. Zhang Longxi. (2002). Maps, Poems, and the Power of Representation. Celebrating Special Collections: Scholarship and Beauty; Colloquium on Information Science: HKUST Library Series no. 6, last revised June 4, 2002. Retrieved March 30, 2006 from http://library.ust.hk/info/colloq/jun2002/zhang-talk.html.

3. Hong Kong Department of Health. (2004). Health Indicators. Annual Report 2003/04, Chapter 1, p. 3-5. Retrieved April 8, 2006 from http://www.dh.gov.hk/english/pub_rec/pub_rec_ar/pdf/0304/ch01.02.pdf

4. Pearce, Fred. (2006). Climate Change: Instant Expert. NewScientist.com Special Reports On Key Topics In Science And Technology, last revised Jan. 19, 2006. Retrieved March 30, 2006 from http://www.newscientist.com/popuparticle.ns?id=in20.

Web sites that can also help

Examples in APA style
From HKUST's School of Business, its pull-down menus give you examples.

Son of Citation Machine
This website allows you to type (or copy and paste) the relevant information into a web-form that then forms a citation. It allows you to choose different styles as well (APA, MLA, etc.).

APA - Electronic References
From the official APA cite, this page also has links to an FAQ, that answers such questions as "How do I cite Web site material that has no author, no year, and no page numbers?".

MLA - "How do I document sources from the Web in my works cited list?"
From the official MLA site's FAQ.

The Library subscribes to a bibliographic management software called Refworks. You can use it to keep your references (to all formats) in order & insert them into your paper. This RefWorks User Guide will help.

3. Citing Online Articles from Databases

The are sometimes known as "aggregated database". The citation style is a bit different than citing "Web Resources", instead they are called "article from an electronic database". Here are examples in APA style and MLA style. There is no "official" CBE or CSE style yet.

APA style:

Kaur, J. (1998) A time-bomb in Sabah's waters. New Straits Times, May 19, 1998, Environment Section, pg. 5. Retrieved October 13, 2000 from LexisNexis Academic database.

Moore, J. (2000). Toxic Haste. Hong Kong Business, 17, 215, 21. Retrieved October 13, 2000, from Proquest database.

Seron, F.J., Rodriguez, R., Cerezo, E., Pina, A. (2002). Adding support for high-level skeletal animation. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 8,4 ,  360-372. Retrieved January 10, 2003 from IEEE Xplore database.

MLA style:

Seron, F.J., Rodriguez, R. Cerezo, E.; Pina, A. "Adding support for high-level skeletal animation". IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 8, iss.: 4 , p. 360-372. Oct/Dec 2002 January 10, 2003. IEEE Xplore database at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org>.

Kaur, Jaswinder. "A time-bomb in Sabah's waters." New Straits Times . May 19, 1998, Environment Section, pg. 5. October 13, 2000. LexisNexis Academic database at HKUST Library <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/>.

Moore, Jack ."Toxic Haste." Hong Kong Business. May 2000, vol. 17, iss. 215, p. 21. October 13, 2000. Proquest database at HKUST Library <http://global.umi.com/pqdweb>.

Footnotes
1. McInnis, Raymond G. and Dal Symes. "David Riesman and the Concept of the Bibliographic Citation". College and Research Libraries Sept. 1988, p. 389-90.
last modified 29 October 2009
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