Hey there! Hello!
Four questions you could ask yourself...
The first one could be along the lines of, "What background does this person have in this topic that they're writing about?" For example, if viewing a web-based article on cooking, what background does the author have in cooking? Are they a professional chef, or someone with a profession that deals with cooking and food often, such as a long-term food blogger or critic? Or, are they just ranting about something related to cooking because they feel entitled, not necessarily because they're an expert on the topic?
Another important one to ask is, "Does this person follow the basic principals of the English language, spelling, punctuation, and grammar?" Misspellings and bad grammar are rarely forgivable, especially when someone claims that you can rely on their information. Take this example into consideration:
"The beagle breed's fur comes in variants of light brown, black, and white. Colors of fur often mix together or spot into other sections of color on the coat."
"Beagles are ctue and colorful. Sometimes they're fur can be darker or lighter."
Not saying that you should solely base the credibility of an article on the grammar, but credible sources and news websites typically check their articles very closely to ensure the information is correct and presented clearly. An article lacking this quality is usually a tell-tale sign of being less reliable.
A third question to ask is, "How old is this resource?" This is especially important for things that change with time, such as research on cancer. A book on cancer research written in 2016 will be wildly different from one written in 1976, since it's such a widely studied topic that's always changing. The book written in 1976 may have been fully credible in that year – but with time, new things have been discovered, meaning that the information in the book may be less credible than what's in the newer version.
The last question you can ask yourself is more applied to website sources, but it's still an important one to ask: "Who is posting this information, and through what domain type?" For example, cdc.gov and webmd.com. The two websites pose themselves as reliable sources for health information, but you can see immediately that one is a government website and the other is a commercial website. Are you going to trust a government foundation or a commercial webpage first when information is conflicting? Reliable information is more likely to come from a .gov or a .edu web domain, simply because these are reserved for government and educational websites, respectively. Again, not to say that .com or .org domains can't be reliable (or that all .edu sites are reliable, since they can sometimes be given to students studying under a certain college), but be wary and check up on the other topics I listed if you want to site one.
The last thing I can suggest, if you are still unsure of a source's credibility, is to compare that information with other sources. Do a few more sources agree with the source in question, or do they all say something different? Do they all share information/opinions that the source in question does not hold? This can be an alternate way of validating info, and may even lead you to find a source of information that you like better than your current one.
Hope this helped you out! Feel free to ask me any additional questions if you have any. :-)
