I. Trust the source. Love your librarian.
The easiest thing to do when researching is to let your librarian do the work for you. Take advantage of your university's resources by drawing on the tools that have already been reviewed and screened by your library staff.
At SJSU, we are particularly fortunate to have a whole bunch of resources like tutorials on issues like information literacy, plagiarism, and library basics. 
One such resource we want to look at is a RESEARCH GUIDE that our librarians have compiled for different disciplines and subjects.
Click on the address below (or the image) to open a new window - keep it open alongside this window.
This is the main university gateway to the library. Look in the left column for "SJSU Subject Guides".
In the other window you've opened, click on "SJSU Subject Guides" When the next page opens, at the top, click on "Women's Studies."
This is the Women's Studies Topic Research page created by WS librarian Bernice Redfern. She has already gone through and found various library, government, web, and campus sources that may be useful for you in Women's studies projects and papers.
If you click on "Articles & Databases," you'll see that she's listed which of the many library databases will be particularly relevant for us doing research papers in WS.
"Federal Government Sources" points to useful .gov sites, and "Web Sites" points to Internet sites that she has already screened and found reliable.
So these are all sources you can immediately use and know they will be acceptable academic sources in your coursework.
There are similar guides for every other university topic and discipline, so remember this great resources for other classes too.
So what were we saying?
Trust the source. When we're working at the university level,
the books and articles we read are peer-reviewed to meet certain academic standards
Trust your librarian to direct you to the most relevant, reliable, and useful sources for your student work.
Still, sometimes library resources are not enough. The amazing thing about the Internet is that resources can be updated within seconds, rather than the weeks, months, or years needed to update print resources.
Independent research sites can sometimes provide information, studies, or data much more quickly than the usual peer-reviewed methods.
But as we mentioned already, the Internet has no controls, no peers reviewing, no "Internet librarians" helping you figure things out. So how do you know what to trust?
And that leads us to lecture point number two.