Introduction:
Unauthentic information in your work acts as a pollutant to your credibility. It will impact your academic reputation, and readers will not be interested in reading your work anymore. Therefore, it is crucial to critically analyze your internet resources from where you have collected data. But, it has now become a huge task to evaluate the authenticity of collected data. Information on internet resources is not regulated for accuracy and reliability. Anyone can now publish anything on the internet. So collecting accurate data for an academic project becomes a highly difficult task. To answer this problem for you, we at Cliqzo have given some useful tips and techniques to check the authenticity of collected data.
Why Is Authenticity Has Now Become An Issue?
Fake data has now become a major concern among students, academics, professors and researchers. With the advent of technology, there is so much data everywhere that it is highly difficult to identify authenticity. There are countless resources, and ensuring that the data is credible is highly important. The information can easily be altered and generate similar copies with slight changes. Also, there are now platforms generating and spreading fake data making it highly important for researchers to ensure reliability in the data they use. In this article, dissertation writing services UK will help students to know how they can find and check the authenticity of resources they use to collect quality data for their academic research.
Ways To Check Authenticity:
Ø Currency:
Check that the information you have collected is up-to-date. Sometimes, you collect data from a recently updated website, thinking it has updated information. But, there is a possibility that the webpage still contains old information and they just edited the title or image in the article, not all content within. So, you just need to cross-check your information with other resources as well.
Ø Accuracy:
This is an important part of checking the authenticity of collected data. Current information cannot always be accurate. Therefore, it is important to check the accuracy of your data by comparing it with other resources.
Ø Coverage:
The authenticity of collected data can be checked by examining its resources. You need to check the websites from where you have collected the information. Have your sources properly covered your topic? Also, have they included relevant information? Make sure to check these sources before extracting any data from them.
Ø Authority:
You need to ensure that your data’s author is reliable and credible in his field. Also, look at the author of the web page from where you have collected the data and check their credentials. Find out if the author is an expert in the field or not. Another way to determine the authority of your data is to look at the website links.
Ø Host:
Check if the host is a reputable individual or organization. It is important to remember that author of your content is not always the host of a website, but the author can have sponsors. That means the author has agreed to publish his content on the website with some terms. Therefore, while checking the authenticity of collected data, pay attention to the host or sponsor of the website from which you have collected data. For instance, you should not collect data from corporate websites because companies can have an agenda based on profit. However, if the data is accurate on the corporate websites, you can use it by collaborating with other resources. In this scenario, it is best to use your judgement.
Ø Objectivity:
Objectivity is a vital factor in determining the authenticity of collected data. The author must have a neutral position. However, you should collect the data from the source where the author has given reasonable and strong arguments with empirical evidence to prove his point. Using a source with ample evidence is important to do an authentic academic project.
Ø Relevancy:
Your data needs to be relevant to the topic. Therefore, it does not matter how much content you find on the internet it needs to be fully relevant to your topic and must help support your arguments appropriately.
Ø Functionality:
The functionality of a website also determines the authenticity of the collected data. Check how much a website is easy to use and navigate. However, you might get some good data from an internet source, but it will not be authentic if their source page is difficult to read and does not have a professional, well-developed look. It will become difficult for your readers to extract citations and find out the exact source of your information.
Ø Check ads:
You might now want to collect data from a website containing numerous ads, especially as these ads are very distracting. A website’s poor appearance can undermine its content’s credibility despite having authentic and accurate information. Remember what your readers or teacher will think of that website. Many will think that you have collected unauthentic information. Therefore, the appearance of an internet source is an important factor in determining the authenticity of collected data.
Test to check authenticity:
You can use two tests to check the authenticity of the collected data.
Ø SMART check:
This method can be very good for checking sources related to the news. In this method, you focus on answering some questions about your data sources. Following are the criteria:
Source: what or who is the source of information?
Motive: what is the motive of the purpose of the author?
Authority: who has written the information?
Review: find out things in the content that could be untrue
Two-source test: compare your source with another source
Ø CRAAP test:
This test can help you set criteria to check whether a source is credible; the criteria include:
Currency: how much the content is up-to-date?
Relevance: how much your information is relevant?
Authority: what is the source of information?
Accuracy: how much of your information is correct?
Purpose: what is the aim of the author?
Conclusion:
The credibility of your data is very important for an academic career. Remember to critically analyze the information you find from internet sources. Also, make sure to check the motive and credibility of the author and the website host. Also, analyze the authenticity of collected data by checking the appearances of its sources.
