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Sustainability Literacy: How to evaluate sources

A guide to help UL students and researchers develop critical thinking skills and identify scholarly resources in specific areas of sustainability

Why it is important to evaluate sources

1.5 million pages of content, articles, tweets and online information is published every hour. That's a lot of information that we need to sift through. Any individual piece of content can be rigorously assessed and must be, before you consider quoting from it or citing it within your academic work. We face 'Information Pollution', Misinformation and Fake News challenges every time that we go online, this guide is intended to give you the skills and tools to evaluate information so that you can see what's fake and what's real.

Top Tips for the best scholarly sources

Top tips for finding trustworthy academic information

1. Use UL-subscribed scholarly databases on the library website to find credible information.

2. Watch the Library's video called 'Know your Sources' on YouTube 

3. When in doubt, ask the Library who will direct you to the best scholarly sources for your project 

Fake News and Misinformation

 

The guide above was produced by IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) and is a good starting point for spotting fake news online.

Other sites to help you spot fake sitesfake news and media bias