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Evaluating Articles

By Martin See

Who did the writing?

You can hear the fashionable phrase research skills widely bandied about these days. The phrase amounts to doing your homework on a certain research topic, which includes finding out as much relevant information as possible by going through the existing literature, be it in paper or digital formats. It does not matter whether you are a student working on your project paper or an employee writing your report; you will constantly require these skills to excel in your work because every argument that you make or every suggestion that you raise ideally requires you to do research on them and to include current literature on those points. Note the use of the word skills in the previous sentences. Being skills, they can be learnt. This article will help you to improve an area of these skills, namely the ability to evaluate articles or sources in your work.

When you are evaluating your articles or sources, you may want to consider these key points:

a) Peer reviews
Most credible articles are peer reviewed by qualified experts in the relevant fields. It means that before the articles are published, they are subjected to intense scrutiny from their fellow colleagues, researchers, and other experts. An article published in Science, the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, would obviously have gone through more processes of regulations and checks as compared to one published in ERPZ (a really unfortunate example). The more rigorous the peer reviews, the more credible the articles will be.

b) Authorship
Before you consider any ideas/arguments made in a paper, always do a thorough research on the author. Is the author a qualified expert in the field of study? An article on the physics of fluids by a well known economist is probably a dubious work. A general rule of thumb is to use the works of authors who are authorities in the relevant research fields. You may also want to consider if the authors have any personal agendas. You are less likely, for example, to believe in a glowing report on the financial stability of Yahoo! if it is prepared by an analyst with a heavy portfolio in Yahoo! shares as compared to an independent financial institution. Some research papers may also be heavily funded by some particular organisations and this may have significant bearing on the conclusions in the paper. Would you trust a health report on the effects of smoking if it was funded by Philip Morris? It is, therefore, important to consider the authors of the articles that you are using in your work.

c) Context
Every paper or every work is written and published in different contexts. If you want a contemporary view of World War I, you would probably not want to pick a book published in the 1920s, the post-era. So carefully consider the contexts of articles before you use them in your work.

d) Recency
When you use an article or source in your work, you would want the most recent idea/argument (assuming that the quality is the same in the comparison) except in special circumstances (e.g. history). This is especially relevant if the ideas/arguments are made obsolete rapidly, such as in the industry of information technology (IT). Unless the old articles offers an unique viewpoint, it would be better off for you to find recent articles to use for your work. As a general rule of thumb, stick to sources that are five years (or less) from your work. Imagine if a work is published in 2005, the research and the data involved in the work would most likely not be from 2005 but from 2003 or 2002. That is at least a gap of 7 years from your work (2010). A bigger gap would be more adverse and you would do well to avoid that in your work.

With all these considerations, I wish you all the best in your research! If you find that there are other considerations too, please share it with the ERPZ audience in the comments section.