User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
a.) Source Used: Online article by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) which states that wildfires could be worse in 2020 than in 2019, globally. Link : https://wwf.panda.org/es/?659911/incendios2020
b.) Classification: non-academic material
c.) How do I know this?
In order to classify this source of ecological information I first had to decide if this source was academic material or non-academic material by answering 3 questions:
1. Is this written by an expert in the field? Although this article is from the WWF website there was no mention of an author and therefore it is not possible to identify if the writer of this article was in fact an expert in the field. Because of this, I labelled this article as not written by an expert in the field.
2. Includes in-text citations? This text gives credit to multiple quotes in the article and gives links to 2 other articles throughout the paragraphs, one of which allows you access to the full report “Forest Fires and the Future: A Crisis Out of Control?”
3. Contains a bibliography? This article does not contain a bibliography
Even though one of the answers to these 3 questions was “yes”, it is not enough to confirm that this piece is in fact academic material, and for this reason I chose to label this article as non-academic material.
If was was to further discriminate among different sources I would then look into this piece and observe if it has been peer reviewed or not by at least 1 referee before publication, which I could find no evidence of. I could further confirm my labelling of the source by finally deciphering if this piece is research material or review material, and since it is not even academic material nor is it peer reviewed, this question need not apply.
