 Any information you use in a college-level paper should be evaluated for the following criteria. In general, these criteria are authority, currency, relevancy, and bias. Items found in the library's databases or in the print collection are considered better sources of information because these sources have been evaluated by librarians before adding them to the collection. The librarians at IRSC carefully select each item added to the library based on the classes that are offered at the school. You still need to evaluate any source you find for each individual assignment. There is a range of degree programs offered at IRSC. An upper-level biology major would not want to use a source written for a lower-level general education class. This aspect is considered relevancy. For an item to meet relevancy requirements, it should meet your professor's requirements for types of sources appropriate to use for your assignment, as well as fit your own information need. Authority refers to the author or publisher of the information. A scholarly source of information will have an easily identifiable author, often with credentials in a job title listed. However, you might want to use information found on the Internet. You can limit your results to known publishers by searching for information on a trusted website. Looking at the domain of a website can narrow your results to better sources. Using information from a .gov or .edu domain will at least allow you to gather information from the U.S. government or an educational institution. When you find information online, you will want to verify the author's credentials by reading the About Us page. If the information comes from an organization you are not familiar with, you can verify the publisher's reputation here. An organization that has been around for many years will have a reputation to protect, meaning that organization will want to maintain a good reputation online and will try not to publish misinformation. Personal authors have varying goals when publishing information online. Using a personal website for research can bring biased opinions or unsupported claims to an argument. To filter out biased opinions from facts, find additional places that support the evidence you have gathered. Do not repeat information you find online if you cannot locate more places that support the same claim. Online social media sites like Facebook or Twitter are the biggest source of unsupported misinformation found on the web. Users see a sensational headline and start sharing the same news immediately. Many do not investigate whether this news is fact or fiction before republishing it. The widespread use of social media makes it possible for old news stories to be republished when they are no longer relevant today, which is why the date and the material matters. As a student, it is important to know that not all information you read online is true. Use the library resources to help you separate facts from fiction online and do some research before choosing a topic taken from an online news source. Information found online is the most current up-to-date information available, but sometimes news is so new that the events surrounding an event may be taken out of context or news commentaries may jump to conclusions before a study of the events and characters has been taken into account. To illustrate this point, let's look at a news story from 2012. This is the case of Rudy Eugene and Ronald Papo. Eugene was killed by police officers as he attacked Papo, a homeless man on a Miami Cosway in broad daylight. Eugene was reported to have taken off all his clothes before attacking Papo. Police ordered Eugene to surrender as he chewed the homeless man's face off. As the story unfolded in the news media, people came to believe that Eugene was high on a dangerous and new design or drug called bath salts. The reason for Eugene's attack was given weight as the president of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, Armando Aguilar, said the similarity between the face-eating attack and some other recent incidents in Miami were striking. He said the cases are similar minus a man eating another. People taking off their clothes, people suddenly have superhuman strength. They become violent and they are burning up from the inside. Their organs are reaching a level that most would die. By the time police approach them, they are a walking dead person. Many respected news stations reported the zombie-like behavior caused by this terrible new drug based on this statement. Despite the fact that Eugene's girlfriend reported that he did not use drugs very much and then nothing stronger than marijuana. The medical examiner's report came out a month after the attack reporting that Rudy Eugene did not have bath salts in his system nor did he have any other strong hallucinogenic in his system. All they could find were trace amounts of marijuana. A study done in the professional journal Contemporary Drug Problems was printed four years after this incident in 2016. In the journal article, the authors analyzed the news stories surrounding the attack and the rumors that began about bath salts being a new drug that makes people feel hot forcing them to take off their clothes as well as gives them super strength and aggressive behavior. This article dispels these myths and backtracks in the news from 2012 to Agrolar's comments about Eugene and the effects of bath salts as the cause for all the hysteria surrounding Eugene's behavior. The article researches the truth behind bath salts and likens it to a drug that gives people a feeling of euphoria and talkativeness. It belongs to the same class of drug as cocaine rather than the PHP or LSD that it was likened to. At the time of Eugene's attack on Papo, bath salts was not set to become the next drug epidemic in America. Many states had already banned their sale and calls to the National Poison Control Hotline concerning the use of bath salts was down by half from the previous year. However, if you had decided to choose this headline in 2012 as a topic you would like to research, you may have been sorely misinformed about the potential of bath salts causing a drug epidemic in the U.S. This reinforces the need to back up all research with better sources of information. News stories are cursory and to get a better idea about a problem, you need to read more in-depth research that can only be found in scholarly journals and books that provide more data into any research question you may have.