Compară metode

	Source Criticism	Witness Reliability Triangulation
Domeniu	Historiography	Historiography
Familie	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anul apariției	1889	1970
Autorul original	Leopold von Ranke; Bernheim and Langlois-Seignobos codification	Classical source-critical tradition; formalized via triangulation in social science
Tip	qualitative critical method	qualitative evidential method
Sursa seminală	Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press. ISBN: 9780801485602	Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press. ISBN: 9780801485602
Denumiri alternative	Quellenkritik, Historical Criticism, External and Internal Criticism, Heuristic and Critical Method	Source Triangulation, Corroboration Analysis, Testimony Cross-Checking, Convergence of Evidence
Înrudite	4	4
Rezumat	Source criticism (Quellenkritik) is the foundational procedure of the historical discipline, by which a scholar interrogates a source before treating any of its statements as evidence. Codified in the nineteenth century by Ernst Bernheim and by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, and rooted in Ranke's insistence on examining documents at first hand, the method divides into two complementary operations. External (or lower) criticism establishes whether a source is what it purports to be: its authenticity, the integrity of its text, its author, place, and date. Internal (or higher) criticism then asks what the source means and how far its assertions can be trusted, weighing the author's competence, sincerity, proximity to events, and interests. Only after both passes does the historian compare independent sources and synthesize a defensible account. The discipline of the method lies precisely in its refusal to take any testimony at face value.	Witness reliability triangulation is the procedure by which a historian combines several testimonies about the same event to reach a justified conclusion about what happened. It rests on a simple but powerful logic: a single account, however vivid, may be mistaken or self-serving, but when independent sources that could not have colluded converge on the same point, the probability that they are all wrong in the same way becomes small. The method, descended from the classical source-critical tradition and sharpened by the social-scientific concept of triangulation associated with Donald Campbell and Norman Denzin, requires the historian to inventory the available testimonies, assess each one's reliability and bias through internal criticism, establish whether the sources are genuinely independent, and then treat their agreement as corroboration while explaining their disagreements. The same Bayesian intuition underlies the use of multiple, independent evidentiary streams in process-tracing case analysis. Triangulation is how disparate, fallible sources are turned into defensible historical knowledge.