Version 27 October, 2010
These are financial arrangements, either for authors or the publisher, that might affect the content of the article. Consider such things as whether the publication gets most of its revenue from advertisers or whether the research was funded by a corporation. Who stands to win/lose from the publication, and might they have influenced what was said?
Is the source subject to review by others? The least reliable are personal websites. The most reliable are articles subject to stringent, independent, often "blind" peer review.
Has sufficient time transpired to collect the relevant data and perform a thorough analysis? Is the medium one with a publication cycle and practices that permit this type of analysis?
How far from the actual event is this source of evidence? Is this a primary source of data, e.g. an eyewitness account or a scientist who carried out the data collection and analysis. Or is it a secondary source, a second- or third-hand report of an incident
Can this account be corroborated (i.e. verified) independently by someone else? Or is there a veil of secrecy, an "unnamed source" or "government official who did not want to be identified"? Is the science replicable? Is there physical evidence to back up the eyewitness's claims?
How thoroughly has the author supported his or her claims? Has he or she made the steps of reasoning clear and explicit? Does the evidence presented support the conclusions drawn (or the headlines featured)? How reliable are the sources that the author uses to ground his or her claims? Note that this requires employing this source analysis recursively.