[MUSIC] Hi, and welcome to the lesson. In the previous lesson, we looked at ways to help you judge the credibility of sources. In this lesson, we're going to look at criteria to help you judge the relevance of sources and look at how these can help you more efficiently select sources to use in your assignments. So, just imagine for a moment that you're shopping for a pair of shoes. You live in the city and you go jogging. So, you'd like a pair of shoes for long runs around your inner city neighborhood. You've been doing a bit of research on what shoes to buy and you've found three options. One, a pair of hiking boots that are highly recommended by a well-known outdoor magazine. Two, a pair of minimal, barefoot style running shoes. These shoes are highly reviewed on specialist blogs for barefoot running, but they've been shown to cause injuries like shin splints when used for long periods on concrete. Three, a pair of lightweight trainers from a reputable company that got a lot of positive reviews online and they've also been recommended to you by your best friend who runs marathons. You probably choose the lightweight trainers, wouldn't you? Why? Well, in terms of credibility, the shoes of being recommended by anonymous reviewers online as well as someone you trust and know personally. The barefoot running shoes don't seem quite so credible in comparison because of the mixed reviews and the reports of injuries, so you can safely reject those. But the hiking shoes are arguably equally as credible as lightweight trainers because of the recommendation by an outdoor magazine. So, why wouldn't you choose the hiking shoes? The answer is because they are not relevant to your training needs. From this example, we can see that credibility while important, it's usually not enough for selecting sources. We need to also establish whether the sources are relevant to our needs. For a source to be useful, both of these criteria must be met. Let's look at some questions that we can ask of sources to evaluate their relevance. The first question to ask is, is the information related to your topic or does it answer your question? The information given in a source can relate to all or part of your topic or question. For example, a source may be answering a similar question but in a different context. Different source will relate to your topic in different ways with differing levels of specificity. For example, if you're question might ask you to focus on the USA but your information source answers a similar question about the UK. And therefore, it may still be relevant and help you answer your question. Or a source may relate to a sub topic or question that you've identified and this may contribute to your information need. For instance, let's look at our example assessment question. You might find a source about driverless cars. You could use this in the assignment to discuss the traditionally human task of driving and the implications of these tasks being done by artificial intelligence. Driverless cars aren't mentioned specifically in the original question, as is medicine. However, you can still use it to answer the question. A second question to ask to establish relevance is does the source meet the needs of your assignment? This particularly relates back to lessons 2.1 and 2.2 about the different kinds of information sources used in different fields. For some assignments, it's okay if you simply use information from your textbooks and course notes. Whereas for other assignments, you may need to do more research to find additional resources. When doing this research, if you find a primary source, consider if it's the type of source that's considered to be appropriate in your field. If it's a secondary or tertiary source, consider if it's appropriately scholarly as an academic source. The third question you should ask regarding relevance is, is the information written at an appropriate level? That is not too elementary or advanced for your needs. To answer this, think about the audience of the source. It may be written for children or teenagers, for lay people, university-educated audiences, for academics, or students in the field. The difference in the audience affects the level of difficulty of the source in terms of technical vocabulary used and the complexity of concepts discussed. You could potentially use any source for an adult audience but you would want to check that the level is appropriate for your field and your topic. Also, you shouldn't spend too long trying to understand sources at a high level of difficulty, but may be targeted at an audience beyond undergraduate level. The last question to ask regarding the relevance of an information source is, is the information appropriately explored? That is not too general or specific for your needs. When answering this question, consider if the source explores the topic to an appropriate level of depth. A tertiary source, such as an encyclopedia, may help you to understand the topic overall and may provide useful definitions of terms. But it's probably going to be to general to use for your main arguments. On the other hand, some journal articles deal with very niche-specific aspects of a topic and are to detailed to be used to build the kinds of arguments you're working on. So, in this lesson, we've looked at criteria that you can apply to help you select relevant resources for your assignments. In the next lesson, we'll practice applying some of these criteria to real examples. [MUSIC]
