Validity and Reliability of Research

Before starting my degree, I had no experience in writing reports or essays and my ability to do so was poor. We covered the concepts of validity and reliability in research as well as other important topics early on and this gave me a much better understanding to progress through my first assignment which was a 2000 word report on how AI is affecting the roles of a network engineer.

Here are a few different ways to determine if the information online is true or false and can be used for referencing:

Checking domains, checking about us page, finding multiple sources that say the same thing, URL structure, author credentials, publication date.

Websites that I've used to find accurate information have mainly been .net, .io, .gov, .edu and .org. These are all top level domains.

There are some really useful websites that can be used for academic writing and referencing, for example Google Scholar and IEEE Explore. I found that using IEEE Explore was my favourite as you can browse so many articles, journals and papers on there and you can specify the publisher date to get the most recent ones. This is really useful as the majority of the reports I've had to write so far have only allowed referencing to be used from sources no older than 4-5 years.