The books, journal articles and web sites recommended for your course will already have been evaluated for their quality by your lecturers.

However, when you are asked to find your own information, you will have to judge its quality. For example, there is a lot of difference between an article on "diets which may prevent cancer" published in a popular magazine like Hello and one that is published in the Nutrition Research journal.

For your work to meet assessment criteria at university level, you need to be able to substantiate your research with acceptable sources.

In this section you will learn how to critically evaluate the information that you use for your assignments and academic work.

The following criteria can help you to evaluate any information you find:

• Relevance
• Currency
• Reliability
• Accuracy