Evaluating Online Information

In addition to determining what the article is about, you need to determine why the author wrote this piece of information.

• Sometimes authors write a piece to educate other professionals about a particular topic or research discovery.
• Example: A journal articles that summarizes a research study about nutrition as related to health literacy. 
• Some authors create articles designed to educate consumers.
• Example: The Mayo Clinic created an article about managing diabetes.
• Some authors create articles that are designed to sway you to a particular way of thinking. 
• Example: An author writes an opinion piece about the dangers of infant vaccinations from his point of view. 
• Sometimes authors will write a piece designed to sell you some type of product.
• Example: An author writes an article celebrating the positive effects of a nutritional supplement, and at the end of the article offer a chance for you to purchase this supplement. 

Be very careful about using articles are designed to sell or sway you to a particular way of thinking.

• As a detective you want a diversity of evidence which will give you an accurate picture of the research done in that area.
• This means you want the good, the bad, and the ugly evidence because only then will you be able to make an objective clinical or research decision. 
• If the author's purpose is to sell or sway, they may exclude information which is important to the topic but directs you away from their purpose. 

If you needed a new car, would you go into a dealership and have them give you any car with no attention paid to price, model, or features? Most people in this situation would go in with some sort of criteria, and would not want to settle. The same could be said for information, you should only find the best information for your project and not settle for information you can find. 

There should be reasons that you included it.

To help you in this process ask yourself these questions:

• Does it help me answer my question?
• How specifically does it help me answer my question?
• Was this a landmark study that changed how people view this topic?
• What is one thing that stands out about this article?

The main objective for using the five W's is to get you to objectively assess the evidence you want to use in your projects!