It has so much to do with understanding, culture, learning, broadening of horizons that they need to learn the skills the hard way. With help from librarians, teachers, experience and… life!

Thanks for taking the time to check out our new toolbar extension and tell your readers about it! We’re so happy that you use EasyBib’s tools.

Just to clarify a bit about what seems to be confusion regarding the Website Evaluation component of this extension: The websites that are currently evaluated in our database were all done by a team of experts at EasyBib. The screenshot and link you provide at the bottom of your article: http://www.easybib.com/kb/index/view/id/172/page/1 is the same that the user will be taken to when they click “learn more” from the toolbar. This page explains in detail just how our actual humans evaluated these sites. We absolutely agree that credibility is not something to be left up to an algorithm or aggregate user opinions. We determined the best practices of top librarians from research universities while creating our criteria.

This is also why you’ll see that many cites were not evaluated yet. We don’t rely on anything but good old fashioned human brain power – so there is no way we could have every website evaluated. We also agree that this process is subjective, open to interpretation, dependent upon purpose, etc. That is why this tool is meant to be a starting point for students. It exists to provoke thought – to make students aware that they need to be considering the quality of their sources, rather than blindly citing the first Google result they happen upon.

We understand your concern that this tool doesn’t appear to explain its reasoning to the user. This extension is just a representation of the full Website Evaluation tool you will find on EasyBib. At the moment you can only access all of its features with a premium account and at the actual EasyBib site. What you will find, however, given that criteria, is that the full tool offers a complete breakdown of how every site is evaluated and how it scored within each specific criteria.

I hope that clarifies some things you may have had misgivings with. This is absolutely a tool, and like any tool it is only as effective as the user who wields it. We never want to outsource critical thinking or make things “too easy”, but rather make the pathways to information literacy more evident so that our students will be more likely to use them.

Best,
Kerry Kitka