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Evaluating the reliability of web pages
Students can generally feel confident that print-based resources, such as books and journals, housed in the College library are reliable and can be trusted. This is because published items will have been reviewed and checked by academically trained professionals. The same can be said of electronic databases to which the library subscribes, they also will be reliable.
However, this is not true for web-based resources; there are no checks, no reviews and no filters. You will have to decide for yourself if information from the Internet is reliable and trustworthy.
Anyone can put anything on the web for almost no cost in just a few minutes; as a student you need to be able to distinguish between the reliable and questionable information that is there. You should try to find out about the author of the web page the same things that you would expect from someone who was published in a reputable print-based source such as a book, journal article or newspaper. In other words what is their authority, what are their qualifications for producing the page?
In order to find out this sort of information you will need to consider several things the most important of which is the URL, or Universal Resource Locator - the address of the Internet page.
URLs
The URL is made up of several parts and they are always laid out in the same order. Here is the URL for The Manchester College’s page about assessing printed sources:
| File type | Domain name | Path to this file | Name of the file |
| http:// | www.themanchestercollege.ac.uk/ | lrc/resources/study_bibliog/ | study_reliable_print.htm |
File Type: http://
This tells the browser that the address is for a web page. The http:// stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the system used on the internet to transfer web pages between machines. A web browser is simply the 'player' that you need to view web pages in the same way that you need a DVD player to view DVDs.
Domain Name: www.themanchestercollege.ac.uk/
This is the host name or domain name, the name of the computer holding The web server that is administering the web site you want to visit and its location of the internet.
Path to this file: /lrc/resources/study_bibliog/
This is the directory in which the web server has to look To find the file that you want. In this example the server looks in the 'study' directory which is a subdirectory of 'resources'which is itself a subdirectory of 'lrc'.
File Name: study_reliable_print.htm
This final part of the address is simply the name of the actual file that you are looking for along with the file extension, in this case 'htm.' - hyper text mark up.
URLs are not complicated they are simply addresses that tell your computer's browser where to look for a file. They are always laid out in the same way and they can tell you a great deal about the website if you know what to look for.
What to look for in the URL
Ask yourself if the page is somebody's personal page? You can usually tell that this is the case if it contains someone’s name (jsmith, smith) or any of the words 'people', 'members' or 'users'.
Not all personal pages will be bad but you need to know whether the author can be relied upon because there is no publisher or controlling body to guarantee that the information that they have placed there is correct.
Next, ask yourself what sort of domain does the page come from? In other words is the site commercial, educational or government? Commercial sites will usually contain .com (commercial) or biz. (business) and will usually have been written with a particular aim in mind. So, they may well be biased, perhaps they are trying to sell you something. Educational sites will contain .edu (educational) or .ac (academic) and they can usually be relied upon since private individuals or companies cannot add these codes to their URLs. Government sites nearly always contain .gov (government) in their URL and they also are nearly always reliable. They may not be reliable if they are talking about a particular political issue; for example, an American government site talking about the Gulf War may well present a prejudiced view, so use some common sense as well.
Ask yourself who published the page and does the publisher seem to make sense? The publisher is the person, agency or company operating the server, or computer, from which the page is issued. The server is usually named in the first portion of the URL between http:// and the first /. Have you heard of this agency before? Does the server appear to correspond to the name of the site, and if not, do you think that it should?
Look at the country code and decide whether that makes a difference to the page. For example the French government was criticised for their treatment of Greenpeace; so, a website about environmental activists which contained the country code fr (France) might not be completely reliable.
The most common country codes are:
| au | Australia | ca | Canada |
| de | Germany | es | Spain |
| fr | France | gb | Great Britain |
| ie | Ireland | in | India |
| it | Italy | jp | Japan |
| nl | Netherlands | su | former USSR |
| uk | United Kingdom | us | United States |
Other points to consider
When you have considered the URL in detail you should scan the page itself for information about the origins of the page. Can you find links which say 'About Us', 'Background', 'Aims' etc.
If there are no sections like this you can often find useful information about the page by truncating back the URL. To do this, go to the top address bar and delete the end characters of the URL stopping just before each / (but leave the slash). Press enter to see if you can see more about the author or the origins of the site providing the page. Continue this process, one slash (/) at a time, until you reach the first single / which is preceded by the domain name portion. This is the page's server or 'publisher'.
What you are trying to do is find out who wrote the page, who claims accountability for it? Look for the name of the author, or the name of the organization, institution, agency, or whoever claims responsibility for the page. An email address with no additional information about the author is not sufficient for assessing the author's credentials because e mail addresses can so easily be falsified.
Ask yourself what are the author's qualifications and authority for writing about this subject? Does the author’s background or educational profile look like one that you would expect from someone who is qualified to write about this subject? Is it possible that the page has been produced by an amateur or someone with a vested interest? Perhaps it comes from a hobbyist, a self-proclaimed expert or an enthusiast? Is the page merely an opinion or part of a blog? Is there any reason that you should believe its content more than that of any other page? Is the page obviously ranting about something, is it an extreme view, is it distorted or exaggerated in some other way? These are all clues to the page having a non-professional origin.
Is it a 'quality' site?
If you cannot find strong, relevant credentials, look very closely at the date of the page and any documentation of sources. Check the site to see when it was last updated; this information will usually be found on the home page but don’t forget to check within the site any individual pages that you might use. Is the page dated, is it current enough? Factual or statistical information that is undated is virtually useless for serious research purposes.
How recent the date needs to be will depend upon your individual needs. For some topics you will need current information, for others it may not matter. Sometimes the importance of the date will simply be to tell you whether the page is being properly maintained or not.
Other indicators of quality information might include 'links', 'additional sites' and 'related links'. In the text, if you see footnotes or links that refer to documentation, take the time to explore them. What kinds of publications or sites are they? Are they reputable or scholarly? Are they real? On the web (where no publisher is editing most pages), it is possible to create totally fake references.
In scholarly/research work, the credibility of most writings is proven through footnote documentation or other means of revealing the sources of information. Saying what you believe without documentation is not much better than just expressing an opinion or a point of view.
Many well-developed pages offer links to other pages on the same topic that they consider worthwhile. They are inviting you compare their information with other similar pages. Links that offer opposing viewpoints, as well as their own, are likely to be found on balanced and unbiased web pages. Pages that offer only one viewpoint are less likely to be unbiased.
Conclusion
Step back and consider all that you have learned about the page. Think about why the page was created and the intentions of its author. Always be aware of the possibility that the page is ironic, that it is a joke or spoof, that it is fraudulent, or that it is false in some other way.
Putting pages on the web is easy, cheap, unregulated, and unmonitored; but all web pages are produced with a particular purpose in mind. This is why you should evaluate carefully whatever you find on the Web. The burden is on you to establish the validity, authorship and integrity of what you find. Documents can easily be copied or falsified and there are no editors to proofread and "send it back" or "reject it" until it meets the standards of a publishing house's reputation. Most pages found in general search engines are self-published or published by businesses with varied motives: inform, provide facts, provide data, explain something, persuade you, sell, entice, share, disclose.
The web needs to be free like that! And you, if you want to use it for serious research, need to cultivate the habit of healthy scepticism, of questioning and evaluating everything that you find.
(If you would like to complete a more detailed tutorial have a look at the Internet Detective; as well as helping you to use the internet this tutorial will also help you to evaluate the quality of websites.)