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More Criteria for Evaluating Search Results

Once you have found a relevant document, you should check its reliability. You can use:

1. Peer review status
2. Citation analysis
3. Impact factor

Peer review status

If a document has been "peer reviewed", it has been subjected to evaluation and criticism by specialists in the field. The document will only have been published if a group of referees have agreed on the quality and the novelty of the information it contains.  

Peer review automatically increases the reliability of that document. To avoid subjectivity, referees are anonymous and the author information is removed from the article under review.

Most scholarly and scientific journals are peer reviewed. There is no definitive list, although http://www.eurekalert.org/links.php?jrnl=A is a nice starting point.

If you are unsure whether a journal has been peer reviewed, you can check with the Ulrich’s (only TU Delft) or the publisher.

Citation analysis

You can use citation analysis as a tool to check the reliability of that author or of that document.

Citation analysis is based on how often a document or author is cited within a certain time period:

• high citation numbers may indicate an important source; 
• high citation numbers for an author over the years means a better position in that scientific field;
• decreasing, stable or increasing citations over the years may tell you something about current relevance of the document.

Beware: an article can be highly cited for being entirely wrong!

Databases and search engines that include citation information are:

• Web of Science
• Scopus
• Google Scholar

Impact factor (IF)

If a journal is cited on average once for each published article, its impact factor will be IF = 1. The greater the number of citations to articles in the journal, the higher the impact factor.

Scientists want to publish in journals with high impact factors: it increases their authotity in the scientific world and can also mean increased research funding.

You can look up the impact factor of a journal in the "Journal Citation Report" database.