The sources you choose to base your studies on affect your academic output. Therefore, you should critically evaluate your sources before using them. So far, you have learned about external and internal source criticism, what characterizes academic texts and which ones are suitable as sources in student texts. On this page, you get a list of source types you should be careful to base your assignment on, and what you should be especially critical of if you consider using it as a source.

Student Assignments

You should not use other student assignments as a source, especially not assignments written at the bachelor's level. This is because you do not know how good they are - the assignment may have received an A, but it may also have received an E. The external quality control student assignments are subject to, the censorship, is also not as strict as peer-reviewed articles or textbooks are subject to. Student assignments are therefore less credible sources.
Another reason why student assignments should not be used is that the author only has a limited insight into the field of study. Even if you find the bachelor's thesis of a professor, the person was still just a student when she authored the thesis.
However, student assignments are fine as inspiration for your own work. You can read other assignments to get ideas for topics or how the text can be structured. You can also find good sources you can use yourself in the reference lists of the assignments. Then you should look up these sources when you are done reading the student assignment, rather than referring to the student assignment.

Wikipedia

Anyone can edit Wikipedia and the authors are often hidden behind aliases. This means that you have no real insight into who has written what. You are not guaranteed that the author of the article has academic knowledge in the area they are writing about, and the source is therefore not suitable for use in academic texts. You also cannot know if the author has made a selective selection of facts and information that are presented.
Wikipedia can be a great place to start hunting for information, but it should never end there. You must always confirm what you find on Wikipedia in academically good sources, and it is these sources you should refer to in your assignment, not Wikipedia.

Artificial Intelligence

As previously mentioned, tools for artificial intelligence, like chatbots, use algorithms to generate text and can therefore contain errors, misleading or biased information. The sources you refer to in your academic texts and assignments must be verifiable. That means that your readers must be able to find and verify the source you are basing your text on. The chatbot produces texts without real, responsible authors and is therefore neither a reliable nor verifiable source.
Chatbots can be a great place to start brainstorming for an assignment, but this is not where you find your sources. You must always find real, verifiable, and academically good sources, and refer to these instead of the chatbot.

Online Debates and Forums

Anyone can participate in online debates and internet forums, and many do so under a false name. These are popular arenas for expressing one's own opinion on issues. Often there are claims that are not supported by research. Online debates are therefore neither credible, objective, accurate nor relevant sources in academic work.

Popular Science Presentations

These are texts that are written for a broad audience, not for people who have, or are acquiring, deep knowledge in the field. Popular science presentations thus simplify the content and focus on communicating complex issues in a simple and easily digestible way. Nuances, discussions, and debates are sacrificed in the process of making complex questions easily digestible for the average person on the street. Therefore, popular science texts are less accurate than research. The people who write these texts are journalists, not researchers, with few exceptions. They therefore do not have the same insight into the subject matter. This makes the texts less credible than other, more scientific, alternatives.

Learning pages for high school students

There are several educational websites specially designed for high school students. The information presented on these sites is often simplified. These sources are therefore not suitable for use in academic assignments. The authors are usually high school teachers, not researchers, and as sources they are less reliable than other types of texts (textbooks, academic articles, scientific articles).

Commercial sources

Commercial sources are not objective sources. They are designed to sell you a product. Positive aspects of a product will always be highlighted, while negative aspects will not be given much weight. It is the lack of objectivity that makes this type of source unsuitable for use in the academic arena.
An example of such a commercial source is paid editorial content in online newspapers. These are texts that look like regular newspaper articles, but in reality, they are articles that a company has paid the newspaper to publish in order to advertise specific products. On online newspapers, such content should be marked, for example, with words like "advertisement," "advertorial," "partner content," or similar.

Influencers, bloggers and social media

Influencers often have commercial interests in the posts and content they produce, and hence they are not a reliable source as the information is subjective and only from their point of view. This also applies to bloggers. However, you can find both blogs and content on social media created by researchers. As their blogs may be reliable, the info is likely to be simplified to apply to a broader audience. In these cases, we recommend that you look for e.g. research articles written by these scholars and use them as your source of information instead.