Finding trustworthy information sources

What are these?

With the lack of quality control on the web, you will often encounter inaccurate information. One way of ensuring the quality of your sources is to use those that have been judged as suitable by a trusted authority. They may use traditional publishing accreditation processes such as peer review which help ensure the information is accurate and reliable.

As with all the information sources you use, you should still use the ideas outlined in the Assessing information screen (in the Getting started section of your course) to make your own judgements about the sources you find. Consider the Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy and Purpose of your information source to evaluate its reliability (read more about the CRAAP Test).

Continuing Education Library

You can explore resources provided by the Continuing Education Library. The team of librarians at the Continuing Education Library have compiled subject-specific lists of resources, which are a great starting point to any research. You can also access a list of digital resources compiled by the Bodleian Library team, some of which are open-access.

Google scholar

Google Scholar provides a simple way to search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, which include: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organisations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Oxford University Press online resources

Oxford University Press (OUP) online resources are a comprehensive subscription-based online resource that contain thousands of items covering a wide range of subject areas. Students of the Department’s award-bearing courses can access these resources through the University’s library catalogue (SOLO) using their Oxford username.

Short online course students can access these through the ‘OUP Online Resources’ block on their online course homepage. The Oxford University Press Online Resources page provides further information for short online course students about the OUP online resource collections available, including details of how to access and search them.

Digital Libraries and journals

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) covers free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

Books

There are a growing number of schemes to make the full text of books available online. The following are some of the largest sources:

Open educational resources

A growing number of universities release free educational content as Open Educational Resources (OER). You can discover these on most universities’ websites. Some examples are:

If you want a more general resource, OER Commons is a good place to start.

Lectures, podcasts and videos

Many universities and other organisations make freely available a wide range of podcasts, videos of lectures and other learning resources. Popular sites to find these resources include:

A note about Wikipedia

For many web users Wikipedia is the first place to go to for information about almost anything. Wikipedia enables all users to contribute or edit content, and it contains information on a huge range of topics. However, because content can be contributed, or changed, by anyone at any time, it should not be regarded as an authoritative source. It is safest to think of Wikipedia as ‘work in progress’, and it is always advisable to corroborate any information found there from an additional, authoritative source. Wikipedia articles should contain lists of references, and that’s a good place to start – following up those references will help to put the Wikipedia article in context. For more information see Reliability of Wikipedia.

Further help

If you found this page useful you may like to explore the information on our other Study help pages.