Choosing & Identifying the Best Source Types for Your Research

Source Types

Characteristics

Used for

Disadvantages

Free Websites

·    Cover a wide variety of sources including books, companies, articles, organizations, State and federal government documents, commercial and personal sites.

·    Anyone can publish websites.

·    Use Website evaluation Guide to evaluate websites carefully: https://guides.rider.edu/webevaluation

·      Free reference resources on many topics.

·      Company information.

·      Government documents.

·      Google Scholar for scholarly content.

·      Free E-books.

·    Many websites are not reliable and may be  a hoax, parody, or satire.

·    Not all articles from Google Scholar are free.

(You can get access through the Rider University Libraries, though!)

·    Information can be overwhelming. It takes time to sort through the good from the bad sites.