If you are searching a bibliographic database such as BEI, ERIC, Scopus etc, your results will generally be of high academic quality - articles 
will be published in key journals in the field, written by well-known reputable academics and likely to have gone through a rigorous peer review process.
If you have identified relevant material from grey literature then it is important that you spend some time evaluating the content before drawing on it within your literature reviews. Regardless of where you find your information, it is important to consider the following points:
1. Who authored the information?
2. What expertise does the writer have to comment?
3. What evidence is used? Are there citations in the piece?
4. What genre is the document: journalism, academic paper,blog, polemic?
5. Is the site/document/report funded by an institution?
6. What argument is being made?
7. When was the text produced?
8. Why did this information emerge at this point in history?
9. Who is the audience for this information?
10. What is not being discussed and what are the political consequences of that absence?
(Taken from Brabazon, T. (2006). The Google Effect: Googling, blogging, wikis and the flattening of expertise. Libri, v. 56, pp 157-167)
There are other similar evaluation frameworks available. The Biological Sciences Library have produced this short video looking at PROMPT from the Open University.
There are several ways in which you can evaluate the material you find, all of which are discussed in the boxes below:
* treat these with caution - sometimes articles are cited numerous times because they are a particularly bad example of research.
Articles that are peer-reviewed mean that they have been approved by a panel of experts on an editorial board before they are accepted for publication; for this reason peer-reviewed journals are often regarded as the best in their field.
Not all journals go through the peer-review process (professional magazines for example) so remember to identify whether your journal article is peer-reviewed - publisher's websites usually contain this information.
Most bibliographic databases enable you to limit results to academic journals/peer-reviewed articles but if you do this, bear in mind that you may miss key pieces of research from your search. If you apply this limit, you should do so in all databases you search.
Read the Demystifying Peer Review Guide from the Office of Scholarly Communications for more information about what a peer-reviewed publication. involves
An Impact Factor is generated from the average number of times articles published within a particular journal title have been cited within a particular year. It can be used to compare journals in the same field and help you to decide which titles to publish in.
There are several factors to take into consideration when using impact factors:
Click the link below to access Journal Citation Reports via Web of Science:
Other useful resources:
Scopus Metrics
Scopus also includes metrics for those articles it indexes and further information can be found here.
Altmetrics can show how research outputs are being shared and discussed via social media and online, which may supplement the information gained from traditional impact metrics.
Beware! Treat altmetrics with caution as articles are occasionally cited numerous times because they are a particularly bad example of research. High online activity isn't always a good thing!
Click the link below to access Altmetric Explorer:
