Video Transcripts : How do I evaluate books and book chapters?

Have you located a book or book chapter but you're not sure if they're appropriate for your research project? This video will explain the questions to ask to evaluate books effectively.

When evaluating a book or chapter ask six key questions: What? who? why? when? where? and how? These questions provide a framework for evaluating books and book chapters. Your answers to these questions will help you identify when a source is not a good choice for your project so you can move on to evaluating other options. However, you might not need to answer every question for every source. For example, a recent publication date matters more in some disciplines than others.

One reason for asking these six questions about each source is to consider bias. All people have innate biases. While scholars do their best to minimize it it is important to think more about who the author is and why they choose to write about this topic, or why a particular publisher chose to publish it. While resources you find through library databases are often a better option than the open Web, it is still crucial to evaluate every source you're considering using in your research.

First ask what? What is the subject of the book or book chapter? Is it relevant to your research topic? Does it add to the information you've already found or provide a new perspective?

You can find this information by looking at a book's table of contents. You can also find it by reading its description in Scholar OneSearch. In this example, we see that the book's focus is on excellence initiatives and policies.

You can often find this information in an about the author section of the book. Sometimes you may need to do a Google search for the author to discover their credentials. Through this search, you can learn about where they are employed, their area of research, other pieces they have written, and their educational experience and background.

Here we discovered the author was a faculty member and business consultant known for work on disruptive innovation.

Next, ask why? Why was this book written? Is it trying to inform? To make an argument? Or to give an opinion?

Not sure? You can look in the book's introduction or chapter abstracts to find this information. Here we see that this book is an introduction to human rights controversies in Canada. It aims to inform. You should check the book or chapter's reference list to see if the authors cite multiple perspectives and also check the types of sources the authors use to cite those perspectives. Watch out for publications that make arguments without providing authoritative references.

Then ask when? When was the book published? Is the publication date recent enough for your research needs? Fields that change quickly, like medicine or technology, will need more recent sources.

You can find the publication date in the book's publication information. You can also find it in Scholar OneSearch listed next to creation date. Here we can see that the publication date is 2014. This makes it too old for a current research paper in the field of education.

Next, ask where? Where was the book published? Was it published by a university press or academic publisher?

You can find information about where the book was published in Scholar OneSearch. You can also find it on the title page of the book. Here we see that the Sense Publishers published this book in the Netherlands.

Sense publishers is an academic publisher. If you aren't familiar with the publisher, search for it online to learn more about it, or ask your instructor about whether it is considered a reputable publisher in your discipline.

Finally, ask how? How have the authors conducted their research or made their arguments? Do they describe their research methods and cite appropriate sources?

You can find information about how they conducted their research in literature review or method sections. Here the authors describe how they reviewed studies on health insurance and health related outcomes.

If you have worked through these questions and you are still not sure about your source, look for book reviews. In Scholar One Search search for the book title and limit to reviews on the left side of search results under material type. This should limit your results to book reviews, which can help you evaluate a source.