Come back to this guide when you're looking for sources related to your next lab report. Use the suggestions here for help finding those sources.
Or use these related research guides:
Use these methods as you evaluate information.
Comparing sources will help you determine which ones are the best and most appropriately relate to your topic. If you conduct a search with a search engine or database and find two different sources that look useful, look at both of them and compare them. One may be more recent, has more information, or seems less biased. That source is the one to choose. Then, you might compare that source with others and see which is most appropriate.
When you find new information that you don't know to be true or not, look for another source to back up the information. If you find another source with the same information, that source corroborates the information in the first. If you find one source that makes one claim, and then find four more sources that disagree with that claim, which are you more likely to believe? The answer to this question will also depend on who is writing those sources. What if the former source in this case is written by a scientist, and the latter four sources are a Wikipedia article, a blog post, and two other web sites that do not offer the author's name or credentials. Which source(s) would you trust in that case?