Peer Reviewed Books and Scholarly Journal Articles
A scholar/researcher/professor writes an article (aka 'manuscript') or book proposal and sends it through the following process.
Editorial Review
Editors are experienced practitioners or journalists
This process is used by
You Review
Everything you find online through Google or other search engine, social media, etc.
The information can be anything from a scholarly, peer-reviewed article to a well-meaning but misinformed article, to a hoax.
Ask the questions that professional fact-checkers ask:
A reliable source is one that provides a thorough, well-reasoned theory, argument, discussion, etc. based on strong evidence.
Scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books written by researchers for students and researchers. Original research, extensive bibliography. Found in GALILEO's academic databases and Google Scholar. Anatomy of a Scholarly Article.
Trade or professional articles or books written by practitioners in a field to impart practice-oriented information. Found in GALILEO databases. Some may also be found through Google or other search engine, but may require payment to see the full text. Beware of sources on the internet that look like trade/professional articles, but don't have reliable content.
Magazine articles, books and newspaper articles from well-established newspapers written for a general audience by authors or journalists who have consulted reliable sources and vetted through an editor. hese sources may provide some of their articles online for free. Newspapers and magazines often contain both researched news stories and editorial/opinion pieces that express the view of the writer. It is important to be able to distinguish between them! Beware of sources on the internet that look like reputable magazines, and newspapers, but don't have reliable content.
Websites and blogs can be reliable or unreliable, hoaxes or sincere misinformation. Researchers and other experts often use blogs as a way to share their knowledge with the general public, but anyone with computer access can do so too, to further any agenda they want. It's up to you to evaluate the quality of what you find online. Online news sources are particularly notorious for false information. Professor Melissa Zimdars of Merrimack College put together a document called "False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical 'News' Sources" to help you read news sources with a critical eye .
Wikipedia contains reliable and unreliable entries - it's up to you to evaluate. The authors are anonymous, so there's no way to determine their expertise, or the expertise of the Wikipedia editor who oversees the entry. Wikipedia editors will post warnings if they think the entry has weaknesses. Wikipedia entries tend to be conservative, reflecting traditional views over newer research.
SIFT is a short list of things to do when looking at a source, and hook each of those things to one or two highly effective web techniques. We call the “things to do” moves and there are four of them:
First, when you first hit a page or post and start to read it — STOP. Ask yourself whether you know the website or source of the information, and what the reputation of both the claim and the website is. If you don’t have that information, use the other moves to get a sense of what you’re looking at. Don’t read it or share media until you know what it is.
Second, after you begin to use the other moves it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole, going off on tangents only distantly related to your original task. If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed in your fact-checking efforts, STOP and take a second to remember your purpose. If you just want to repost, read an interesting story, or get a high-level explanation of a concept, it’s probably good enough to find out whether the publication is reputable. If you are doing deep research of your own, you may want to chase down individual claims in a newspaper article and independently verify them.
Please keep in mind that both sorts of investigations are equally useful. Quick and shallow investigations will form most of what we do on the web. We get quicker with the simple stuff in part so we can spend more time on the stuff that matters to us. But in either case, stopping periodically and reevaluating our reaction or search strategy is key.
The idea here is that you want to know what you’re reading before you read it.
Now, you don’t have to do a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation into a source before you engage with it. But if you’re reading a piece on economics by a Nobel prize-winning economist, you should know that before you read it. Conversely, if you’re watching a video on the many benefits of milk consumption that was put out by the dairy industry, you want to know that as well.
This doesn’t mean the Nobel economist will always be right and that the dairy industry can’t be trusted. But knowing the expertise and agenda of the source is crucial to your interpretation of what they say. Taking sixty seconds to figure out where media is from before reading will help you decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you to better understand its significance and trustworthiness.
Sometimes you don’t care about the particular article or video that reaches you. You care about the claim the article is making. You want to know if it is true or false. You want to know if it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement.
In this case, your best strategy may be to ignore the source that reached you, and look for trusted reporting or analysis on the claim. If you get an article that says koalas have just been declared extinct from the Save the Koalas Foundation, your best bet might not be to investigate the source, but to go out and find the best source you can on this topic, or, just as importantly, to scan multiple sources and see what the expert consensus seems to be. In these cases we encourage you to “find other coverage” that better suits your needs — more trusted, more in-depth, or maybe just more varied. In lesson two we’ll show you some techniques to do this sort of thing very quickly.
Do you have to agree with the consensus once you find it? Absolutely not! But understanding the context and history of a claim will help you better evaluate it and form a starting point for future investigation.
Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. Maybe there’s a video of a fight between two people with Person A as the aggressor. But what happened before that? What was clipped out of the video and what stayed in? Maybe there’s a picture that seems real but the caption could be misleading. Maybe a claim is made about a new medical treatment based on a research finding — but you’re not certain if the cited research paper really said that.
In these cases we’ll have you trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you can see it in its original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Mike Caulfield, Washington State University Vancouver