Archaeology: Evaluating Resources

From Shan-Estelle Brown. Writing in Anthropology: A Brief Guide. Oxford University Press, 2017 (GN307.7 .B76 2017).

REVIEWING THE LITERATURE

First Look at the title and identify I\its key words

Review the abstract

Examine the structure

Identify the purpose

Ask the essential questions:

• What is the question, controversy, or problem driving the study?
• Who or what group was being studied?
• How was the study executed? What method was used? What kind of study was done?
• What questions were addressed or asked in the study to generate data?
• What was found in the study? What were the results of the study? Why did the scientists found what they found?
• How does this study—in its methods as well as in the findings it shares—relate to other relevant or potential studies?

DEVELOPING YOUR ARGUMENT
To move from a series of summaries to an argument, ask yourself the following:

• What is my specific problem or research question?
• How does each source relate to it?
• What type of literature review am I conducting?
• Am I seeing trends in theory, in methods, within the work of specific researchers, in findings across sources? What can I say about the trend?
• What unexpected findings or patterns emerged as I read across the literature?
• Are there contradictions or telling points of disagreement in the literature?
• Where do I stand on the specific debates under way among the authors of the sources?

Q: "Like, how do I know if a resource is good?"

A:  Put it through the C.R.A.P. test!

Currency

• Is currency important for your topic?
• How recent is the information?
• Can you locate a date when the resource was written/created/updated?

Reliability

• What kind of information is included in the resource?
• Does the author provide citations & references for quotations & data?
• Is the content primarily opinion?
• Is the information balanced or biased?

Authority

• Can you determine who the author/creator is?
• What are the author's credentials (education, affiliation, experience, etc.)?
• Who is the publisher or sponsor of the work and are they publisher reputable?

Accuracy

• Where does the information come from?
• Is the information supported by evidence?
• Has the information been reviewed or refereed?
• Can you verify any of the information in another source or from personal knowledge?
• Does the language or tone seem unbiased and free of emotion?
• Are there spelling, grammar or typographical errors?

Purpose

• What’s the intent of the article (to persuade, sell, etc.)?
• For Web resources, what is the domain (.edu, .com, etc.)?
• How might that influence the purpose/point of view?
• Are there ads on the Web site or in the resource?
• How do they relate to the topic being covered?

Wikipedia is a  wonderful tool for finding general information on a wide variety of  topics, but you can not rely on as a source of credible information for academic purposes.

According to Wikipedia, it is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 15 million articles (over 3.2 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.

This sounds pretty impressive, but as Wikipedia also points out, as a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its contents, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it. 

Read Wikipedia's Disclamer pages, which tell you what you as a scholar should know about this useful online resource: "USE WIKIPEDIA AT YOUR OWN RISK."