Research and Information Literacy
Research and Information Literacy tests how you find, evaluate, use, and credit information. Expect questions on source types, search strategy, relevance and authority, bias and purpose, quotation and paraphrase, citation, plagiarism, and synthesizing multiple sources without distorting them.
Core rules
- Evaluate sources by currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose. A domain suffix is a clue, not proof of credibility.
- Distinguish primary sources (raw evidence, original documents) from secondary sources (analysis or interpretation) and tertiary sources (summaries).
- Quote exact language for close analysis; paraphrase to compress or integrate; summarize to capture the whole.
- Cite ideas as well as words. Patchwriting-keeping sentence structure while swapping synonyms-is still plagiarism.
- Synthesize by grouping sources around a question, noting agreement, disagreement, and gaps.
Worked example
A student finds a blog post claiming a new study proves a diet “works for everyone.” The post cites no sample size and links to a press release, not the study. Evaluation: low authority, unclear accuracy, commercial purpose. Better use: locate the original study and check its sample and limitations. The reasoning applies criteria to the source’s chain of evidence, not its confident tone.
Traps
Treating a .org site as automatically neutral; citing a secondary summary as if it were primary; paraphrasing too closely; using a source only for a statistic while ignoring its argument; omitting page numbers or access dates required by the style.