Evaluating web resources

We need to make a distinction here between using the Internet to find your own resources and using web-based resources which have been monitored and provided by the iecturers and tutors in your department. You may find that academic staff put resources on the web for you to access. These may be iecture notes or other materiai which has been vetted and sanctioned as appropriate for you to use. Obviously, because they are recommended texts, there is no need to approach them with caution. 

When you use the Internet to do your own research you need to develop some understanding of how to evaluate the validity and authority of the sites that you visit. Once you have found a site that you think you might like to refer to in your written work, you need to evaluate it and decide whether you can reasonably regard it as an authoritative source. The next section should help you to do this. 

URL is short for universal resource locator. It is the address that you type in when you are looking for a particular website. For example, http // www.open.ac.uk will take you to the website of the Open University, UK. If you do not know the URL you can use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Lycos, to search for the name of the site. The name will usually be displayed with the URL. You can then click on the URL to get to the site. 

If you know what to look for, the URL can give you a lot of very useful information about the site and help you to decide whether you can rely on the information it contains. It can teU you whether the site is  

It can also tell you the site s country of origin, for example au applies to sites in Australia. 

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You need to evaluate web resources carefully for their academic suitability. 

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