Evaluating the results of your search
1. Evaluation of results
While gathering resources for your search, it is important to evaluate their reliability.
The characteristics to examine are:
- origin
- value
- scientificity
First it is necessary to analyze the origin of the collected information, to establish the reliability of the search results. The results may come from:
- a generic magazine, with generic content for a large audience;
- a scientific/specialized journal, with a limited scope and aimed at an audience of scholars selected on the basis of the discipline;
- a printed or electronic book for dissemination or specialist research;
- a personal blog, written by a researcher/expert in the sector with contents that reflect the activity of study and research or by a person with a generic interest for a theme, therefore the blog is populated by opinions or interpretations of facts in a predominantly individual way;
- a wiki, a website that allows a community the editing of news, with changes, contributions and corrections.
Secondly, it is essential to consider the value of the information according to its degree of:
- relevance, that is, the adherence of the result to the research topic;
- updating, i. e. the actuality of the result found;
- specificity, that is, of an accurate level of detail.
The scientific nature of a text lies in the methodological rigor with which the facts are analyzed, according to criteria of originality and objectivity that allow re-use in further research activities. These texts are generally published on sectorial scientific journals, which favor their dissemination to a specialized and interested public.
The degree of scientific importance of a work is measurable:
- with qualitative methods, such as peer-review, that is based on the judgment of peers (evaluators), at the moment the most reliable of the methods for assessing quality;
- with quantitative methods, i.e. in numerical terms, through measurements based on mathematical and statistical analyses.
In the field of scientific research, peer review is the procedure of selecting articles written by scholars and researchers, carried out through an evaluation of recognized and authoritative experts in the sector, who verify their suitability for publication in specialized journals .
Each of them provides its own evaluation, including any explicit suggestions and recommendations on the text of the manuscript.
Once the article is approved, the publisher proceeds to publish it. Overcoming the judgment of experts in the sector confers scientific quality and reliability to the text itself.