Guidelines for Online Sources in My Courses

• The Problem

• The Internet offers near-instant access to a variety of information that you might find helpful in your research. Yet because anybody can post information online, and because most on-line information does not have to pass any standards of peer review (unlike conventional published resources), there is a very real risk that on-line resource can lead you astray. For example, my research on territorial claims has led me to web sites that claim to the same piece of territory but that are actually nothing but thinly disguised propaganda pieces attempting to support the writer’s country. I have had far too many students unquestioningly use such web sites as sources in research papers, assuming that all of the “facts” and opinions presented are accurate and do not need to be questioned or investigated further.

• Of course, it is always possible to mis-use traditional library sources as well as online sources. For some reason, though, my students have had a much worse problem in this respect with Internet sources. This may be because Internet sources are seen as possessing more credibility than traditional sources, or it may be that the students who have had trouble with this in the past are generally students who have waited until the last minute to do their research and thus haven’t taken the time to evaluate their Internet sources (while most students who research in the library have generally started early enough that this hasn’t been a problem for them). Whatever the reason, though, this has been a very serious problem for students in my courses using online sources in their papers.

•