Once you have picked a topic that interests you for your science fair project, ideally you must do some background research on the topic. This will yield you enough information to allow you to make a good hypothesis to experiment on for the project.

You can collect information from the library, science related websites and even your friends and teachers. This information will be the basis for your making up your hypothesis and so you need to be sure that the information you have is accurate and relevant.

So how do you know if the information from the background release is good or bad? The first indicator is the source of the information. If it comes from a teacher it has more credibility than if it comes from your classmate.  Of course you will have to ensure that the teacher has no bias towards one point of view.

Another factor is the age of the information. As you know new discoveries can out date old knowledge in science very fast. So make sure that the information that you collect is the latest in the field. Also ensure that you made no mistakes in understanding that information. Errors in the hypothesis could creep in if you did not know what the information you accessed actually meant. This would effectively ruin the science project.