Biography: Web Resources

American National Biography Online
This website offers biographies of more than 19,000 men and women -- from all eras and walks of life -- whose lives have shaped the nation. 

IPL2 Biographies
IPL2 presents detailed annotated sites for biographies.

Infoplease
Biographies of academia & culture, arts & entertainment, business, government, newmakers, science, and sports. 

American Presidents: Life Portraits
This website profiles the men who have served as chief executive of the United States. It provides an in-depth look at each of the presidents, their lives, families and administrations.

The National Portrait Gallery (United States)
This is a searchable site that contains photographs, portraits, and biographical information on thousands of prominent Americans.

Nobelprize.org
The Nobel Foundation site includes the Nobel Prize winners from 1901 to date.

Biographies of Women Mathematicians
This is a website for biographies of women in mathematics, and what their achievements are in this field. On this site, you can find essays or more resources on women mathematicians.

You can ask the following questions to determine if a source is credible.

• Who is the author? Credible sources are written by authors respected in their fields of study. Responsible, credible authors will cite their sources so that you can check the accuracy of and support for what they've written. (This is also a good way to find more sources for your own research.)
• How recent is the source? The choice to seek recent sources depends on your topic. While sources on the American Civil War may be decades old and still contain accurate information, sources on information technologies, or other areas that are experiencing rapid changes, need to be much more current.
• What is the author's purpose? When deciding which sources to use, you should take the purpose or point of view of the author into consideration. Is the author presenting a neutral, objective view of a topic? Or is the author advocating one specific view of a topic? Who is funding the research or writing of this source? A source written from a particular point of view may be credible; however, you need to be careful that your sources don't limit your coverage of a topic to one side of a debate.
• What type of sources does your audience value? If you are writing for a professional or academic audience, they may value peer-reviewed journals as the most credible sources of information. If you are writing for a group of residents in your hometown, they might be more comfortable with mainstream sources, such as Time or Newsweek. A younger audience may be more accepting of information found on the Internet than an older audience might be.
• Be especially careful when evaluating Internet sources! Never use Web sites where an author cannot be determined, unless the site is associated with a reputable institution such as a respected university, a credible media outlet, government program or department, or well-known non-governmental organizations. Beware of using sites like Wikipedia, which are collaboratively developed by users. Because anyone can add or change content, the validity of information on such sites may not meet the standards for academic research.

Check the domain type, as it might influence the nature of the information you are viewing.

• Commercial sites usually end in .com. They might be trying to sell you something or promote their own product, so beware of self-promotional language and potentially incomplete or biased information or statistics.
• Academic sites end in .edu, but examine the URL and the page's content. Is it a library web page, or a student's personal project?
• Government-related sites end in .gov. These are generally reliable because the document is from a U.S. government-affiliated site. Keep in mind that reports, data and statistics, and official documents may be more reliable than general interest pages.
• Non-profit groups such as public interest organizations, religious groups, and think tanks use the .org domain. These sites may be biased toward the organization's point of view.