Harper College Distance Learning Orientation

How can you tell if a website is reliable?

There are many websites—but which ones are good sources of information? Which sites are reliable? When visiting websites to find information it is important not to take everything at face value.

• Is the organization credible?
  Evaluate the credibility of the website itself. Review the URL. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a type of URI (Uniform Resource Indicator) that indicates the address of a file or web page on the Internet. For example, http://goforward.harpercollege.edu is the URL for the Harper College home page. The domain name of the Harper website is harpercollege.edu, an educational institution. Evaluate the type of domain name—is it a nonprofit organization (.org), a business (.com or .biz), an institution of higher learning (.edu)? Businesses may share information in a way that gives the business an advantage, so be careful. Nonprofit organizations or schools will sometimes provide a more objective treatment of a subject.
  
  Be careful of information found at free websites—the URL of a site hosted on a free web server usually includes part of the free web server’s name and might begin with something such as http://www.angelfire.com/foldername/mysite or http://mysite.tripod.com. Information obtained from a website that has its own domain name, such as http://www.mywebsite.com, will usually (but not always) be more reliable than information obtained from a free website.
  
  
• Are there links to additional resources?
  Hyperlinks indicate websites with supporting or additional information that can be helpful to you in your research as you explore a topic. Look for these types of hyperlinks to aid your studies.
  
  
• How recent is the information?
  Another item to look at is the date the web page was created or last updated. While some information is timeless, very often a web page that has not been updated for several years is outdated and not the best source of information.
  
  
• Is it Wikipedia?
  Wikipedia is a good place to begin research, but don't accept what you read there for fact, and avoid using Wikipedia as a resource for academic assignments. Why? Well, except for a few protected topics, anyone can update Wikipedia with anything! Usually it all gets sorted out eventually — but be aware that the information you read may not be valid.
  
  Feel free to begin exploring a topic a Wikipedia but scroll down to the bottom of the Wikipedia webpage and look for "References" —then explore those websites and others that you may find. As you locate information also consider the other criteria— credibility, domain name, and timeliness.

Adapted from Basics of Web Design: HTML5 & CSS3, used with permission.

 

Copyright & Your Academic Assignments

By enrolling at Harper College, you've agreed to follow the Academic Honesty Policy.

Cheating/plagiarism includes copying work from others, submitting work that someone else has created as your own, sharing quiz answers with others, requesting quiz answers from others, copying and pasting information from other sources (such as web pages) without providing quotations and citing the resource, and rephrasing information from other sources without citing the resource.

Copy and Paste Is Not Your Friend

Although it's very easy to copy and paste from electronic resources, that's not an appropriate way to share the results of your research. Here's the scoop:

• When you locate useful information for an academic assigment, restate the ideas or concepts in your own words and cite the source. Your insructor will provide you information on the citation format used in your class.
• If a small phrase is written so perfectly that you simply could not rephrase it and retain the meaning, then place that small phrase within quotation marks and cite the source. Your instructor will provide you information on the citation formaton the citation format used in your class.

Notice how restating and rephrasing information is very different than just copying and pasting, it requires thinking, reflection, and, well, usually results in learning! :-)

Harper College Library

Visit the Harper Library for more tips and for resources to help you be more productive when you search for information online.