Evaluating the results of your search
| Site: | Attività formative complementari |
| Cours: | BiblioCompass: a guide to bibliographic search and library services for Agricultural Sciences 2025-2026 |
| Livre: | Evaluating the results of your search |
| Imprimé par: | Visiteur anonyme |
| Date: | lundi 8 juin 2026, 09:14 |
Description
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.
2. Platforms for publishing research outputs
FLORE
Flore is the institutional repository for Florence University research outputs, which preserves publications of professors, researchers, doctorate students, working within the institution.
Publications are also valid for the evaluation of the quality of research (Valutazione Qualità della Ricerca VQR) promoted by the Ministry of Univerisity and Research and conducted by the National Agency for the evaluation of the university system and research (Agenzia nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca ANVUR), supervised by the Ministry for assuring the quality of the national university and research system.
Professional platforms online
There are also social professional platforms online, very used by researchers for spreading their publications and getting noticed.
LinkedIn free web service for developing a professional network, by publishing curricula, professional experiences, contents related to professional issues. | |
Academia.edu website for researchers used for sharing scientific publications and monitoring the impact factor. | |
ResarchGate social network dedicated to scientific disciplines. The platform offers search options and the possibility to share scientific works. |
3. Websites evaluation
Reliability of websites
For checking the quality of websites from which data are retrieved, a first evaluation regards the nature of the website, through the domain of the site. The main types are:
- national; for example an italian one .it or english one .en
- generical; for example .com
- institutional: .gov for government sites
Some criteria for evaluation
A website can be observed and evaluated as a whole, by paying attention to some elements:
- Authoritativeness: contents expressed by a certified or identifiable author
- Freshness: updated information
- Content: it is objective and accurate, expressed in a linear and adequate language
- Originality: news and different point of view supporting a research
- Spendability: purposes appropriate to the user to whom it is addressed
- Esthetics: graphic layout that is not only pleasant, but also functional to the navigation through the website
- Identifiable by
- Name or logo
- Presentation of themes it deals with;
- Information in the footer about the site editor, updates, identification
Usability and accessibility criteria
The usability and accessibility criteria concern how to make the site accessible to the widest possible audience, and more easily navigable, even for users who do not have advanced technologies and complex software. Compliance with the usability and accessibility criteria certainly makes the website more reliable.
On the websites of the institutional bodies they are declared among the administration documents of the site according to the Guidelines for the websites of public administrations, in terms of Accessibility, Websites, Transparency, Usability.
The University of Florence itself states them in the document Accessibility of the websites of the University of Florence.
Criteria for the visibility of a website
The sites that appear first are not always the most reliable and the most relevant to a search you have launched. Commercial sites make extensive use of different strategies, to make themselves more visible, even without having the scientific reliability necessary for the purposes of research, for example aimed at a degree thesis.
There are criteria to make a site more visible, in order to obtain better results in the recovery phase, when a search is made in engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc.
We talk about search engine optimization activities = Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which serve for example:
- to create keywords for indexing the contents of the page
- to create suitable terms for the description of the images on the site page and make them searchable
- to name the pdf files as closely as possible to the content expressed therein