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COB 318 - Legal & Ethical Environment of Business

This guide will help COB 318 students use JMU Libraries resources to navigate their research assignments.

The ABC's of Evaluating Business Sources

How do you determine if a source you found online is reliable? It is increasingly difficult to tell apart good information from bad when searching online. This is especially prevalent on Google, but even business databases aren’t immune. Some of our business databases are more transparent than others about the data they use and some just catalog information to make it easier to access, but don’t evaluate it for accuracy.   

The ABC's of Business Sources method introduces key questions which you can ask to help evaluate the information you find online for reliability. 

Authority, accuracy, bias, currency, and context

Adapted from the ABC's of Evaluating Business Sources by Loyola Marymount University

Authority

  1. Is the author name clearly identified?
  2. What is the author’s education and/or experience in the industry? Google their name in quotes!
  3. Who is responsible for the website? What is their/its reputation? 

Accuracy

  1. Are there noticeable spelling or grammatical errors?
  2. Are there citations or links that show where the information comes from? Are the sources they cite also reputable?
  3. Are other sources citing this source? Or is this source an outlier?

Bias

Bias is not just political! it can also be economic, religious, racial/ethnic, geographic, gendered, heteronormative, etc.

  1. What is the author’s interest in sharing information? To sell? To persuade? To inform? To entertain? 
  2. Does the author make it clear when they are expressing opinions?    
    1. Quiz: How well can you tell factual from opinion statements?
  3. Are other points of view explored or expressed?

Learn more by exploring the resources below

Currency

  1. When was this information published, last reviewed or last updated?
    1. Not having this clearly labeled is a red flag
  2. Is there any reason to be suspicious of the date (April 1, for example)?
  3. Is the page and/or site being maintained? (Look for dead links or an outdated formatting style)

Context

The set of circumstances or facts that surround an idea, so that it can be fully understood and assessed.

  1. Am I looking at a fragment, or the full picture?
    • For articles: is this summarizing or paraphrasing a different source? Look for vague references like "this study claimed" and try to identify the original source to find out what was said.
    • For pictures: What context existed around the image taken i.e. is it from a specific event, who took the photo, etc.? Do you have the full story or just the image to interpret? Images on their own can be misleading and lead to bias. Try using Google Images to find the source of an image.
    • For videos: is this a clip from a larger video, e.g. a snapshot from an interview? It is easy to mislead by presenting a clip of information out of context. Try to identify the original source to learn more about what happened around the video clip.
    • For statistics, data points, and infographics: Was this piece of information from a larger study? How did the researcher arrive at that number?

Learn more by exploring the resources below