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Evaluating a Website

Added Apr 16, 2020 •

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this video will demonstrate the crap test in action the examples here are from real-life students were assigned to find and evaluate websites that would be appropriate for college-level academic research we're going to take a close it was turned in on the topic of performance enhancing drugs in sports okay drug free sport. Com what is this they offer services they have a resource center they say there are proven winner this Resource Center sounds good for research so let's check this out so there's a bunch of different topics here and each one says more and if I click on more I can see that there is a little bit of information and then it's kind of a teaser and it says learn more in the re see the resource exchange center and this is true for each topic under more it gives you a little teaser of information and then it asks you to become a member at the site so the letter P is in crap is for purpose and it seems like the purpose of the info here is to get you to buy a membership to the site and we're not going to do that for research we're not going to spend money to subscribe to some and if we click on about us here we can see that this organization is actually more about providing services for pay than it is about providing academic information so the crap test tells us this is not so good for academic research moving on Sports Illustrated magazine timeline of performance enhancing drugs in sports Sports Illustrated is a really well-known and widely read popular magazine and the timeline here has a bunch of useful facts that illustrates the doping is not just a problem of the present-day I mean hey it goes back to 1886 and that's kind of cool information that maybe not everybody knows and no doubt they have a team of editors and fact-checkers to make sure that they don't publish incorrect information but I scroll to the bottom of the page I don't see a reference list and for an academic paper that would be really good to see and it helps us with the letter R which is for reliability the other thing that I noticed is that the timeline ends in 2008 and coming back to the top I can see it was posted in 2008 and that was the last date that it was updated so when it comes to the historic information currency that's the letter c and crap it's not that important. That much has changed about this information from ATM a  but a lot has happened since 2008 that would be important to include in your academic paper okay the Mayo Clinic now we're really getting somewhere the Mayo Clinic is a known and trusted name for health formation but in case you've never heard of them before if you go to the bottom of the page and click about this site you can find out that this is a trustworthy collection articles it's written by medical professionals it's when all these Awards and it's also interesting to me that they post their ad policy here I don't know if you noticed they have these ads on every page of the site which I do to attract somewhat from their appearance of objectivity but by posting their ad policy they I don't know add transparency to having the odds in the first place coming back over here scanning the article we can see that there's a lot of detailed information about risks and side effects for each type of drug and if we go to the bar the page we can see oh this is page 1 of 2 so there's even more information on the next page and here is their list of references so this tells us where did they get their information and how can we track it down to verify it or ticket information on a topic if we're interested so this site I'm going to say is reliable and authoritative it gets the librarian thumbs up so here's one more bonus sites if you look at the URL you can see there's a. Gov in here is from the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health these are very very authoritative sources and if you look at the actual information here there's not a ton of information this is a brief overview but if you look down here at suggestions for places to get more information please are going to be great suggestions because they come from a trusted source so you wouldn't necessarily cite this information cuz there's not a lot here you could use these links for other articles for multimedia and also these links to organizations like the DEA or the office of National Drug control policy hey maybe this or agencies that you wouldn't have originally thought of checking but they probably do publish data and statistics and other information fact sheets that could be really useful so I hope this example helps you see how to apply the crap test to evaluate sources for research thanks for listening

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