Posted 29 August 2011 - 01:49 PM
Hi!
You cannot trust information that you find on the Internet, unless you have ensured that the information comes from a reliable source. You can check if the essays have been sourced from a credible journal, have been accepted as user submissions, or have been extracted from another location on the Internet. Often, you can find articles that have not been reviewed but have been published onto the Internet either by the authors or by other individuals or groups. The lack of reviews for selection simply suggests that the article may have introduced a bias or may have misrepresented facts to convince the user to take a particular course of information, or is simply information stated as a fact without the necessary steps taken for verification and for ensuring that the inference drawn by the author have not been made based on any logical fallacies.
Many academic institutions even consider Wikipedia to be an unreliable source because individuals or organizations can modify the articles for defacing the pages, for defamation, or to promote their own interests. Some individuals consider articles as acceptable if they come from a .edu, .org or .gov domain, but with the increasing number of domain names, you could extend that list to .mil domain names and possible others that have been established as second level domain names, such as .org.uk, .gov.in, or similar domain names that are alternative for their first-level domain name equivalents. You should not, however, use domain names as a means of determining the credibility of an article because just about anyone can register a domain name, setup a website, and put up articles.
A peer-review journal is the best source that you can rely on, followed by books authored by credible authors and published by reliable publishers. Even so, commercial book publishers may have their own agenda for promoting a subject area either because they have a lot of publications in the area or because they want to draw readers away from competing publishers. Publishing firms that have been setup by non-profit educational institutions are often considered among the most credible, but then again you never really know and should treat any information that you acquire with some caution.