Evaluating Sources in History

Throughout your studies, you may be required to locate and reference primary and secondary sources when writing a history paper. After finding a promising source, you may wonder how you can tell whether a primary or secondary source is credible and worth using. To determine the credibility of a source, you must discern if the source’s content is reasonable, trustworthy, accurate, and verifiable.

Listed below are questions to evaluate and measure the credibility of primary and secondary sources.

Reasonable

• Do the author’s claims or statements seem plausible?
• Does anything the author states seem outlandish or exaggerated?
• What does not make sense logically? Why does this material not make sense?

Trustworthy

• What makes the author credible (e.g., credentials, expertise, skills)?
• Was the author present at the time of the historical event?
• How soon after the historical event did the author write about it?
• Does any of the historical information sound biased?
• Are any of the author’s conclusions biased?
• Does a museum, archive, or historian provide any criticisms of the source?

Accurate

• Do the dates, people, and places of an event match across primary sources?
• Do primary sources describe the event in similar ways?
• If information differs among primary sources, what might account for that difference?
• Does the secondary source describe a historical event or person using multiple primary sources?

Verifiable

• Do multiple accounts of a historical event exist, or is it only one?
• Do the people providing the historical accounts agree about what happened? If not, about what do the accounts disagree?
• Does the secondary source acknowledge the existence of multiple historical accounts?
• Does the secondary source objectively consider the value of each historical account?
• Does the secondary source cite the work of other historians or experts?

History is full of conflict and controversy, so historical figures may disagree over what happened in the past. Therefore, keep in mind that even if historical accounts of an event differ, the accounts may still be considered credible. When multiple, relatively credible accounts exist, evaluate each perspective fairly to understand the full historical context surrounding an event.

Work Consulted

Marius, Richard, and Melvin E. Page. 2014. A Short Guide to Writing About History. 9th ed. London: Pearson.