Now that you know how to find out who publishes a Web site and writes its content, and why they do so, it's time to learn how to determine the third critical question to ask when evaluating a Web site: When?
One of our writers recently thumbed through some newspapers from 1940 that she found in a basement. This showed her why finding out when something published is so important.
The year 1940 was an interesting time in the world. World War II started a year earlier when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, so there was a lot of coverage of the war in Europe, but at that time Pearl Harbor had not been attacked, the U.S. had not entered the war, there was no D-Day, nothing was known about the Holocaust and no atom bomb had been dropped on Japan.Newspapers are usually credible sources for research. But this 1940 snapshot of the war, although filled with the most accurate information at the time, today could not be the only source in a research paper about World War II.
Now, this example might seem too obvious—most people would know that there was more to the story, so they'd look for other sources for the research. But the publication date makes a large difference even in contemporary stories. As events unfold over hours, days or weeks, the stories often change a great deal. What a source says about a scientific discovery, about a living person, a war or conflict, a new technology or any number of other things can very quickly no longer be true.
For instance, a year ago there were many stories expressing concern that the H1N1 virus was on its way to becoming a deadly global pandemic. So far this hasn't happened, and if you wrote about the H1N1 virus using only reports from a year ago, your paper would be seriously inaccurate.
When doing research, make sure to check the dates of your sources. If you can't tell when a source was written, then keep looking until you find a good source about the topic that does have a recent date, so you can see if anything has changed. Always use a news search engine to see if there are any new developments, do a Web search with the current year as one of the search terms, and use advanced search options to find recent results.
And conversely, if you are writing about a historic topic, you should make sure to include primary source documents, such as newspaper and magazine accounts written at the time of the event. If an event occurred in July, 1950, then sources written that month may offer a more accurate account of what occurred than a source written today, 60 years later.
It is often hard to find older documents in a search engine; you must go directly to a Web site that has old archives. Time offers free archives, and Google News Archive, The Atlantic and The New York Times offer a mix of free and paid articles going back more than a century. The Library of Congress offers a list of places to find other historical newspapers online for free.
Thank you for reading,
Mark E. Moran
CEO
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