Librarians have developed many useful acronyms to support you in evaluating information.

Two acronyms that can be particularly helpful are RADAR and APP.

RADAR stands for:

Relevance
Authority
Date
Accuracy
Reason for Creation

When evaluating an information source using RADAR, you can ask the following questions to help in assessing each criterion:

Relevance:

• Does this source fit my topic?
• What is this source's intended audience?
• Is that intended audience appropriate for my use case?

Authority:

• Is/are the creator(s) of this source clearly identified or known to me?
• How important is it in this use case to trust the source's creator(s)?
• If it is important, why should I trust the source's creator(s)?
• Is the source's creator credentialed or an expert in their field?

Date:

• Is the creation or publication date of this source identified or known to me?
• Is this source too old?

Accuracy:

• Do this source's facts "check out"?
• Does the source have references of its own?

Reason for Creation:

• Why was this source made?
• Was this source made to sell a product or service, to inform/educate, to entertain, etc?

APP can also be useful if you need to evaluate a source a bit faster.

APP stands for:

Authority
Purpose
Process

When evaluating an information source using APP, you can ask the following questions to help in assessing each criterion:

Authority:

• Who is the author and what is their expertise to write on the topic?
• Does the publisher seem credible?

Purpose:

• Why was the source created? To entertain, inform, or persuade?
• Who was it written for? Other experts in the field, the general public, etc?

Process:

• How was the source created?
• Where did the author get their ideas?
• Did the source go through peer review or a form of quality control to verify the information is correct?