The Internet allows people to create and to share information in ways that once seemed possible only in science fiction. At the same time that we can benefit from the open nature of the Internet, it's sometimes hard to decide what online information to trust and to use.
This guide offers some simple, evidence-based strategies for evaluating the credibility of online sources.
These strategies will help you look beyond less important surface features of a web source (for example, how professional it looks or if it's a .org), and think more carefully about who is behind the source, what their purpose is, and how trustworthy and credible they are.
This guide draws largely on research from the Stanford History Education Group and on teaching materials from Mike Caulfield's SIFT approach and his Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.
What is a research gap? Missing pieces or areas in the literature that have not yet been explored or are under-explored.
The gap could be in: population or sample (e.g., size, type, location, etc.); methodology; data collection and/or analysis; other research variables.
How to identify a gap:
