After locating potentially useful material, there are several ways to quickly determine whether or not it is useful for your project. Below are lists of reasons to decide that a piece of information is or is not useful for your project.
Reasons to include information:
- contains facts/opinions that you need
- contains illustrations or data you need
- contains an overview to establish the context of your paper
- was written by a well known authority or expert
- contains a point of view that illustrates something you are trying to establish
- exemplifies something - shows an example of xyz
- may have a clear explanation of something
Reasons to exclude information:
- it may not be from a scholarly journal, something required by your instructor
- it may be from a scholarly journal but be too difficult for you to understand
- it may be out of date
- it may not have the point of view you are researching
- it may not contain any new information.
- it may be too narrow (or too broad) in coverage
