1. I was trying to answer the question "What are the diseases that the Europeans gave to the American Indians?".
2. I used the GOOGLE search engine.
3. I used the search term "European diseases AND Native Americans" and "Europeans diseases OR Native Americans"
4. I received 1,200,000 hits when i used AND in my search and i received 14,200,000 hits when i used OR. Using OR created more hits in my search. I think this was because OR included either search terms while AND only allowed hits which had both terms used.
5.I mainly used Authority and Objectivity when i evaluated my results.
6. On one site, i determined that the value of the site was not good because the person did not have much Authority as he based most of his article on an unreliable source. There was also no mention of a specific author of the information and there was no way to contact the author.
7. The main question i had was whether or not a source of an article was credible.
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We also discussed the results of using boolean operators the other day, so I don't need to comment here.
ReplyDeleteI do appreciate your evaluation, but I wish you had told me what web site you were evaluating.
As for knowing if the source of an article is credible, you usually need to read more than one article and find out the prevailing opinion of scholars of note. Another way to tell is to go to the source of the article, if possible, and evaluate that, too. If your original article is based on original research, that research should be explained in detail in the paper and you then evaluate the methodology that someone has used to see if it is valid or flawed. You can also see if the article has been cited by other people (that's something we don't normally cover in this class, but we could talk about it later). If other researchers cite the article you're evaluating, that's an indication that it is valid and that the work is worth something to the research community.
You did a good job on this.
It was delightful to meet you in person the other day.