Skip to Main Content

Nursing: Evaluating Information

This guide contains resources and guidance to help students studying Nursing.

Reviewing your sources

 

An important skill you will develop throughout your studies is critical appraisal - and part of this is recognising that not all information you come across is of high quality.

This page will show you one way of evaluating information.

The CRAP Test

 

Are scholarly sources the only sources I should use?

While scholarly sources like peer-reviewed articles will be your go-to source for most assignments, they are not the only type of resource you will be using. Other resources include:

  • Reports and statistics
  • News articles
  • Websites

However with these sources, it becomes harder to judge the quality of the information. Before using any of these sources, you should see if it passes the CRAP test.

Does my source need to pass every part of the C.R.A.P. test?

In most cases, no! Depending on what you need to find, you can decide which parts of the CRAP test are more important.

For example, if your topic was about: 

Rates of nurse burnout over the last 20 years.

The information you are looking for doesn't necessarily have to pass the currency test, but would still have to pass the relevance, authority and purpose tests.