• Own views
• Reflection
• Guidance from recognized authorities
• Department of Health (DH), National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), World Health Organization (WHO)
• Guidance from professional organizations
• Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), Royal College of Nursing (RCN)
• News and media
• The BBC, The Times newspaper
• Information websites
• Wikipedia
• Expert views
• Journals
• Peer reviewed, research based
• Non-peer reviewed, based on opinion
• Books
• Blogs

Make a list of the sources of evidence you have used in previous academic work. Now rearrarange this list, so that those you think most trustworthy are at the top and the least trustworthy are at the bottom.

• Journals (peer reviewed, research based)
• Guidance from recognized authorities or professional organizations
• Books (research based)
• Journals, books (expert views, reflection, non-peer reviewed, based on opinion)
• News and media, information websites, blogs, own views

Journals and books can be based on either research evidence and subjected to extensive review by a group of knowledgeable experts, or the personal opinion of the author and not reviewed. This has a huge impact on their trustworthiness.

Journals are likely to be more up to date, as it takes only a matter of months for a journal article to be published. Books take considerably longer than this.

Guidance from recognized authorities and professional organizations is likely to be based upon research, so should be a trustworthy source, but you will need to ensure this is the case.

Expert views, news and media, blogs and your own views all have a similar problem. They are based upon the perspective of only one or maybe a few individuals. This means that they may be anecdotal, based on hearsay or myth. While what they say might be very relevant, you will need to confirm this with a more reliable source.

Information websites, such as Wikipedia, are very convenient and easy to use. However, there is one big problem, which is that anyone may add information anonymously to such sites. This means it is possible that information is incorrect. While peer-reviewing systems may exist with these types of sources, they may not be sufficiently robust to ensure information is trustworthy.

• How many jelly babies can a nursing student eat before they are sick? Quantitative research (answer is a number)

• What challenges do student nurses experience in their first practice placement? Qualitative research (because this question can only be answered by asking student nurses about their experiences and recording their answers in words)

• Do patients think nurses should wear hats? Quantitative research (yes/no answer)

• What do nursing students enjoy most in the first year of their course? This question could be answered using qualitative research (focus on experiences of nursing students captured by asking them this question in an interview and recording the answers in words) or quantitative research (nursing students could be given a list of experiences (items) encountered in the first year of their course and asked to tick which ones they enjoyed most, which would be recorded as number of ticks per item) or using a mixture of both (mixed methods)