Q. How can I tell if a video is scholarly?

When you're choosing videos (or even images or audio) to use in a class presentation or discussion, it's important to apply many of the same criteria that you do when evaluating a website or an article or book.   While videos are not likely to be peer reviewed, they can be scholarly. 

Here are some quick things to check:

• If there are author names associated with the video, can you investigate to find out if they are experts in the field? 
   
  • Use our library to find out if they have published articles or books on this topic. 
     
  • Search for them in Google (hint: put their name in "quotation marks") to find out if they teach the topic at the university level or if they work as a professional in the field.
    
     
• What organization published the video?  
   
  • If you found it on YouTube, you can look for the channel name for clues.  Click to the channel homepage to read about the publishing organization or individual.
     
  • Government agencies, professional associations, research institutions, journal or book publishers and universities are trustworthy sites (if you're searching via Google or another search engine, look for web addresses ending in .gov, .org and .edu in particular).  Look for an "about" link on the website to learn more about the organization.
     
  • Company websites aren't necessarily bad, but remember that they have products to sell.  Watch out for bias.
     
  • Avoid videos or images from blogs, personal websites, social media and Wikipedia. These are too difficult to verify and may contain both bias and inaccuracies.
     

• Open Access Research:  Multimedia - these are free video sources of the highest quality.
   
• Alexander Street Press - a huge collection of subscription videos on a wide range of topics
   
• Library subject pages  - subject-specific videos can be found on many of these topical pages.

See Also:

credible