 Welcome to How to Evaluate a Source Before Reading It. In this video, you'll learn how to evaluate scholarly articles by looking at key parts of their descriptions, which are viewable within a set of library search results. We engage in many different levels of intensity as we encounter the written word from day to day. Because not everything requires our full attention, we're often able to read quickly and shallowly or slowly and intently. Let's think of there as being three levels of reading intensity. When we use the least intense level, we're usually looking at websites, flyers, or advertisements just to get simple factual information. At the middle level, we take more time to read each phrase and sentence because we're interested in more detailed aspects of a piece, such as a newspaper article or a movie review. The third most intense level of focus is the one that we often reserve for important, highly detailed, subtle, or complex pieces of writing such as textbooks, legal documents, or award-winning literature. We might need to help ourselves focus by annotating the text itself with underlining comments in the margins, or we might even compose a summary to refer to later. We don't engage in deep reading as often as the other levels of intensity because, frankly, it's difficult, and there's way too much out there to read. So when we're looking through complex, challenging scholarly articles for research, we need to be strategic about choosing which items to devote the special kind of attention to. After you've used filters to reduce and narrow a set of search results according to parameters such as date or subject, you still need a way to look through your results to identify items most likely to be useful for your project. Luckily, when you search for items through the library website's interface, you're given detailed but digestible descriptions of most items in our holdings. Deep reading these brief descriptions can help you make quick but informed decisions about which articles are worth saving and reading more fully. Let's deep read this citation. We'll break it up into different parts and consider how each part can help us know more about the article it refers to. Let's start with article title and author name. The article title is the most condensed indicator of what the article is about. So read it carefully and unpack every phrase to see what it indicates about the article's focus and content. If you run into terms or phrases that you don't understand, look them up. The title of this article is pretty straightforward, but that won't always be the case. Next, check out the author or authors. Look them up online to get a sense of where they're coming from and why they might or might not have a valuable perspective on the subject matter. Most authors should have some kind of online footprint that tells you who they are. Consider that academic credentials are not the only measure of value when it comes to perspective. Next, pay attention to the journal title, year, volume number, and page range. A journal's name often suggests a clear disciplinary or methodological focus that will extend to any articles it publishes. Journals that have been around for a long time, such as this one, are often well-established avenues for spreading knowledge. But younger journals may be more on the cutting edge of a discipline. It can't hurt to look up the journal title as well. The date of the article will tell you how current its content is. For the sciences and social sciences, three to five years or more recent is considered current, but the humanities has a longer shelf life of about eight to ten years. Finally, the length of an article should tell you how much or how little information it contains, as well as whether you're going to be able to give it a good read while still staying on schedule with your project. After deep reading the citation, scroll down on the long description of the article to see the subject terms it's been tagged with. These vocabulary terms, which function like hashtags, will tell you what the article is about, as well as what it's not about. You might consider adding one or more of them to your bank of keywords. This article is in an immunology journal, but what do its subject terms tell us about the article's specific focus? The most important part of an article's detailed description is the abstract. It's a brief summary of an article's main argument or content. It's always good to see your search terms featured here, but also consider mining the abstract for new search terms. If you'd like to do a deeper dive to get more detailed information about an article's content, read its first and last few paragraphs. This is usually where authors lay out the big picture of their work. Also consider looking at the bibliography to see who else writes about the topic that might be worth reading. As you get started with the research process, remember that time and energy are two things that are not unlimited. There's so much material out there that you'll have more energy for the later stages of your project if you can implement time-saving approaches like this one early on. Good luck with your research. For more information, contact us at libraryat2lane.edu. Or visit our website at library.tulane.edu.