This is a response to Oliver’s post.
Oliver,
You asked the question: If you could only determine whether a source can be trusted based on one thing (authorship, publication, date, etc.) what would it be? Or in other words, what is the most important element for you to determine a source’s reliability?
This is quite a difficult question as each part of the article indicates so much about the source’s reliability. Despite this, when I think back on the first indicator I check to confirm the source’s credibility, I realize it is to check whether the source has been peer edited and deemed a scholarly article. If the source is peer edited, that means the source I am reading has been read by other scholars who acknowledged the reliability of the study and author at an academic level. Trusting others’ opinion about the credibility of a source is useful in this context as it could be trusted that the study was critiqued by experts in their field if the article was found from a reliable database. Also, at a glance, peer-edited sources matched with a credible publisher gives me confidence in the article and its trustworthiness.