Finding Trustworthy Internet
Sources
BY MARK J. BOONE
EDITED BY UWC STAFF:
LISA CRAWFORD, LEAD EDITOR
(© DBU University Writing Center)
Contents
No Substitute for Traditional
Research…………………………………..............slides 3-4
Trustworthy Domains: .edu, .gov,
etc……………………………………………….........slides 5-8
.com Extensions…………………………………….slides 9-11
Scholarly Databases……………….................slides 12-13
It’s All about the Source……………………………..slide 14
The First Thing to Know
 The first thing one should know is that internet sources
are no substitute for both reading and quoting good books.
 The same applies to good magazines and scholarly
journals. Do not fail to use these sources in the research
process.
 Internet sources should enhance, not replace, traditional
research methods.
The Problem
 The internet is a place where one can find just about all
the information in the world in a couple of seconds.
The advantage of this is that good information for research
papers is just mouse-clicks away.
 The disadvantage is that bad information is just as close.

 This workshop will help in finding the right internet
sources for research papers .
Trustworthy Top-Level Domain Names
 The extension of the website can be very useful towards
finding trustworthy sources, extension meaning the
indicator of the website’s association, such as .com:
www.thisisawebsite.com.
 For instance, .gov stands for “government agency.”
Because they are associated with the government,
“.gov” websites are usually trustworthy.
.edu Extensions: Trustworthy
 One of the best top-level domains for research is likely to be the
.edu extension. Any site from a .edu domain is connected in
some way to a university establishment. It may state or be…
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the university’s official stance on something
statistics simply conveyed through the university website
a university English department’s summary of the Enlightenment
a professor’s site with resources useful to students in her class
the findings of the scientific studies of a research university
 Any and all of these situations involve information which has the
university’s seal of approval on it because of the .edu extension.

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It is safe to say that such sites generally carry the authority of that university.
Few internet sources could be more trustworthy than these!
.org Extensions: Often Trustworthy
 Sites with the .org domain are for organizations.
 Sites with .org domains are often more trustworthy than .com
sites, though the level of trustworthiness varies from
organization to organization.
 Also, an organization’s relevance to the project will also vary.
For instance…
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A charitable organization that works in the Sudan may be a good source
for research on humanitarian crises of our day.
An organization that exists specifically to collect statistics on American
religion (like www.barna.org) would typically be a trustworthy source
when one needs to write a religion paper.
.org Extensions . . .
 On the other hand…
 www.moveon.org is run by an organization that, during the 2004
presidential election, was dedicated to keeping George W. Bush from
being re-elected.
 Anything moveon.org says about politics would be considered biased
information.
 One might want to quote from it for its point of view, and then also
present www.gop.org’s stance on the issue being researched.
 Writers have to learn how to distinguish between .org sites
that provide accurate information for projects and ones that
do not.
.com Extensions: Sometimes Trustworthy
 The .com extension stands for “commercial.” The .com extension
is a catch-all category that includes all sorts of things.
 Do not use just any .com for research papers.
 Some .com’s are run by very respectable, intelligent people.
Others are pure frivolity or lies.
 .com sites vary both in accuracy and relevance.
 Websites with the .com extension are like most internet sources:
researchers need to evaluate each website to determine if it is
trustworthy and appropriate to their research projects.
.com Extensions . . .
 Foxnews.com and cnn.com are sources which convey accurate
information through a minimum of bias. Rushlimbaugh.com
and michaelmoore.com may present some accurate
information, but are probably heavily filtered through bias.
 Microsoft.com is a worthless source for a paper on dentistry. If
a paper is about the management styles of software
corporations, microsoft.com may be more appropriate.
.com Extensions . . .
 Some websites, such as wikipedia.com or
sparknotes.com, have a wealth of information and
may be useful in the early stages of research for
familiarizing oneself with a topic.
 Wikipedia.com, sparknotes.com, and other such
websites are not scholarly sources. They are merely
resources for getting started.
 Therefore, they should not be quoted as an authority
on topics in papers.
Always use scholarly databases!
 Dallas Baptist University has a wealth of knowledge
accessible to its students through its library
(www.dbu.edu/library).
 A scholarly journal contains scholarly information in a
given field of study, intended for professionals and students.
 The collection of databases containing information from
articles in scholarly journals is probably the single best
online resource for research papers.
Use Scholarly Databases . . .
 For example . . .
Ebsco’s Academic Search Premier search and InfoTrac’s
Expanded Academic ASAP search are very useful for all sorts of
research projects.
 Archives of the Dallas Morning News are available through
DBU’s database subscriptions.
 Gale’s Literary Index will help with the research papers for
English classes.
 Ebsco’s Religion and Philosophy collection will help in religion
classes.
 These are only a handful of examples. Writing a major research
paper without the aid of scholarly journals from the online
databases would be, to say the least, a bad idea.
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The Bottom Line
 The bottom line is that it is all about the source. Learn
how to use trustworthy sources and not use
untrustworthy sources.
 Also, learn how to use the source for what it is.
 Both of these strategies presuppose that writers are
already learning to find out what a site is in the first
place. There needs to be a process of continually
learning how to do this.