Teaching & Learning Librarians at MSU use these (or similar) questions to help students develop evaluation and critical thinking strategies as they learn to identify scholarly information.
Questions
- How does the layout of the article support a particular argument? Is it structured to guide the reader through understanding the research being done (point to specific examples)?
- Does it use discipline-specific language (point to specific examples)? What does that tell you about the intended audience or primary readership of the article?
- Is the author someone who you would expect to be an expert on this topic? How can you tell? What kind of authority does the author have?
- What types of evidence does the author use in the article? Can you understand how the author arrived at the conclusions they did?
Materials
- Research Basics Modules (particularly Popular, Scholarly, Trade, and Evaluating Information Online): libguides.lib.msu.edu/modules/
- Popular, Scholarly, Trade comparison chart: libguides.lib.msu.edu/findarticles/popschol
Local Expertise
- Subject Librarians: lib.msu.edu/contact/subjectlibrarian/
- Teaching & Learning Librarians: lib.msu.edu/infolit/