Evaluation of General Sources

For my specific controversy, I will be exploring the large debate of over-vaccination in household pets done by the medical field, specifically focusing on how a veterinarian got fired and banned from his office for admitting that his company was over vaccinating their patients. The two articles that I've found portraying the two different sides will be reviewed in this post.

One is from WebMD and the other is from Stamford Advocate.

What is the URL of each and what does it mean?

For the WebMD article the URL is:

http://pets.webmd.com/features/pet_vaccination

For the Stamford Advocate article the URL is:

http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Stamford-vet-at-center-of-vaccination-debate-4284673.php#photo-4205984

Both articles contain a ".com", meaning that it is a top level domain with an intent of commercial use.  A ".com" is much like  a ".info" or  a ".biz", showing to people that these pages are indeed a real Internet website. A ".edu", ".gov", ".com", and ".org" are deemed to be very credible sources.

Who is the Author? Are they trustworthy?

For the WebMD article, the author was Bill Hendrick and was reviewed by Audrey Cook. After reading a biography on Bill Hendrick, his qualifications are trustworthy. He's been writing for multiple news sources since 1979 and was interestingly enough one of the people to predict and write about the stock market crash in 1987 two months before it happened.

For the Stamford Advocate article, the author was John Nickerson. John Nickerson had a short biography, explaining that he was a breaking news reporter for the Stamford Advocate and Hearst Connecticut Media Group. He is also an avid boater and tennis player!

When was the info last updated? What type of hyperlinks were there?

For the WebMD article the information seemed a bit out of date since it was last updated on March of 2011, but it has good information from the perspective of a specific part of the medical field. It would hyperlink to articles about the difference between healthy dogs and unhealthy dogs (their own site's articles). So, my overall assumptions of this article was very biased driven, but overall useful information on one side of the debate.

For the other article, it was more updated with its information because it was published on February of 2013 and had many other hyperlinks that linked to other articles done by other people, showing the expanse of their research.

What is the purpose of the article?

For the WebMD article, the purpose is to persuade and inform people on what they believe is the process of vaccinations and what is the healthy dosage. The purpose is to also qualm the fears of those who think their pets are being over-vaccinated.

For the Stamford Advocate article, the purpose is to inform people on a specific event in the debate where a person from the medical field spoke against his company on over-vaccinations.

Are their graphics? What purpose do they serve?

Both posts are limited on their graphics. They both have a still frame at the beginning of the article to draw the reader in, but none throughout the article, mostly to focus on what they are writing about.

Lindsay Perry. "John Robb". January 25 2013 via Stamford Advocate.

What is the position of subject?

From the WebMD article, it was easy to see that it was a more biased source because it only had links, quoting itself, but it was still credible because of their overall quality and references.

For the other article, this seemed to be a creditable source, showing both sides of the story, but a little more biased towards those who believe there is over-vaccination. This information seemed to be more well-versed because of the links to other articles that were not their own.

Does the source provided further links for inquiry?

Both articles provided more sources wither throughout the article or at the end, giving the reader more information to look at if they wanted to see other pieces of evidence.