Evaluating a Web Site

Web sites are usually more difficult to evaluate because you don’t know anything about who wrote the site.  At least with a book or article, an editor has looked at the work before publishing it!  But with the web, anyone can write anything and put it up on the Internet… 

Steps to follow:

• Is there an author listed?

 

• What can you find out about the author on the web site?  Look at the page you are using – is there anything on this page?  If not, go back to the home page for the web site – is there anything about the author there? 

 

• If you cannot find anything at all about the author on the web site, try searching for your author’s name in other places – the library catalog, article databases, Internet search engines.  See what you can find out about this person and whether they have written anything else.

If there is no author….

• Is there an organization responsible for the site?

• What can you find out about them? Often, there is a link to their own home page, where they say who they are, what their purpose is, and if they have a director or someone responsible for the organization.

 

• Questions to consider: Is the organization trying to make money?  Is the organization connected to the government or is it a government agency?  Is it an educational organization?  A non-profit organization? The answer to these questions will tell you something about the bias of the organization and therefore probably also the bias of the information on the web site you are evaluating. 

 

• If there is no information about the organization on the web site, do a separate search on the web and in the article databases, to see what you can find out about it.