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Sources that are reliable for some material are not reliable for other material. For instance, otherwise unreliable self-published sources are usually acceptable to support uncontroversial information about the source's author. You should always try to use the best possible source, particularly when writing about living people.
Scholarly sources and high-quality non-scholarly sources are generally better than news reports for academic topics (see § Scholarship, above). Press releases from organizations or journals are often used by newspapers with minimal change; such sources are churnalism and should not be treated differently than the underlying press release.
Briefly: published scholarly sources from academic presses should be used. Historical research involves the collection of original or “primary” documents (the job of libraries and archives), the close reading of the documents, and their interpretation in terms of larger historical issues.
Does the source indeed support the material? The author. Who is the author? Does the author have a Wikipedia article? What are the author's academic credentials and professional experience? What else has the author published? Is the author, or this work, cited in other reliable sources? In academic works? How does the author make a living?
Historians carry out original research, often using primary sources. Historians often have a PhD or advanced academic training in historiography, but may have an advanced degree in a related social science field or a domain specific field; other scholars and reliable sources will typically use the descriptive label historian to refer to an historian.
The CRAAP test is a test to check the objective reliability of information sources across academic disciplines. CRAAP is an acronym for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. [1] Due to a vast number of sources existing online, it can be difficult to tell whether these sources are trustworthy to use as tools for research.
Sources of information are commonly categorized as primary, secondary, or tertiary sources.In brief, a primary source is one close to the event with firsthand knowledge (for example, an eyewitness); a secondary source is at least one step removed (for example, a book about an event written by someone not involved in it); and a tertiary source is an encyclopaedia or textbook that provides a ...
In most academic institutions, Wikipedia, like most encyclopedias and other tertiary sources, is unacceptable as a source for facts in a research paper. Some encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica have notable authors working for them and may be cited as a secondary source in some cases; institutional policies will vary.