From Cornell University:
Evaluating Content on the Internet: Is it Scholarly, Substantive, Popular or Sensational?
Scholarly information is written by academics for the academic community. Often these journals are online supplements to existing printed journals. The information normally contains experiment data, graphs, and citations. The language used reflects the discipline covered.
Examples:
Journal of Biological Chemistry
Psychology
Nature
Substantive information generally covers news and other events. Substantive articles will often report scholarly information in a way that is understood by a larger group of educated people. They are usually more attractive than scholarly articles, and often contain illustrations that make the information clearer for the layperson. They are typically written by an editor or reporter of a news service.
Examples:
New York Times
Washington Post
Scientific American
Popular information contains lots of illustrations, and are written at a level that most of the population can understand. The main purpose of popular information is to entertain, sell products, or promote a viewpoint.
Examples:
Reader's Digest
PC Magazine
Sensational information is intended to create disbelief, or make inflammatory remarks about politicians and celebrities. It can be viewed as entertainment (or truth for those of us who are that gullable!).
Examples:
The Weekly World News
National Enquirer
Check the Source
On the Internet, everyone can be his or her own publisher. Many have argued that this has democratized the Internet, allowing voices that were not previously heard in the publishing world of books and magazines to be heard for the first time. On the other hand, editors (who work for publishers) act like filters, and become a quality check for what gets printed.
If the Internet document is not coming from a well-known publisher, check the credentials of the author.
Is the author even listed?
Is there a way of contacting the author?
Is the author credible in the printed world?
Is the author representing a larger group of people?
The saying "on the Internet, no one knows that you're a dog", may have some truth to it.
Check the Domain
The domain name is the last part of the Uniform Resource Locator (or URL). The most common domains include: edu for the educational domain, gov for government, com for commerce and org for organization. Countries outside of the United States tend to use country codes, ie. ca for Canada, and fr for France.
The domain name may help you evaluate the reputability of the information. Companies won't necessarily lie to you, but they may report findings in a way as to sway you to purchase their product or service. Public policy and statistical information is generally more reliable coming from a government sites or an educational site.
Is it Current?
Check to see when the file was created, and the last time it had been updated. You can usually find this information at the bottom of each Web page. Currency is typically not an issue for Internet documents, unless however, they contain time-sensitive information (like stock quotes).
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