In life we are constantly surrounded by information, and it is not always easy to know which sources we can trust. Being able to assess the reliability of information is an important skill that can be used at school, at work and in daily life. In the midst of all the advertising, debates and blogs that surround us, how can we separate the wheat from the chaff and get straight to the point?
Steps
Method 1 of 2: Evaluate Sources for Academic Projects
Step 1. Understand the university standards
Academic writers are expected to adhere to stricter criteria than those observed by casual writers, and even by some branches of journalism. Consequently, your sources must also be of a higher level.
- Citing information from an unreliable source makes the academic public wary of the whole argument because it is based on information that belongs to a lower level of integrity.
- University teachers have a good memory; if you rely too much on unreliable sources, you will be a scarred writer, and your reputation ruined.
Step 2. Consider the author's academic reputation
In every field, there are a handful of academic thinkers who are considered the giants of the discipline in question. As far as literary theory is concerned, for example, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucalt are three eminent figures, whose work represents the foundation of the discipline; mentioning them would be of great help in establishing your credibility as a scholar in your field.
- This does not mean that the work of less established scholars is not credible. Sometimes, citing a scholar who goes against the grain can give you the ammunition for a convincing devil's advocate argument.
- In the academic environment, these arguments are sometimes more valued than those based on the writings of famous intellectuals, because they suggest the possibility that you possess the ability to question normally accepted views and push the boundaries of the discipline.
- You must be aware of any scandal that has undermined the credibility of even scholars whose reputations are well established. For example, the reputation and credibility of social philosophy scholar Slavoj Žižek were seriously damaged in 2014 following an accusation of plagiarism.
Step 3. Focus on sources that are academic and have been peer-reviewed
These sources should be the first way to go when embarking on research for an academic job. They have the highest possible level of trustworthiness, and you can always use them safely. In this designation, there are two elements that deserve clarification: "academic" and "peer review".
- Academic sources are written by experts in a particular discipline for the benefit of other experts in the same field. They are written to inform, not entertain, and give the reader a high level of knowledge, as they are specifically aimed at people with a professional interest in technical information relevant to their specialty.
- Peer-reviewed articles are not only written by experts, but are also read and evaluated by a panel of peers - other experts in the same field. This commission establishes whether the sources used in the article are reliable and whether the methodologies used in the studies are of a scientific nature; in addition, they provide professional opinion to determine if the article meets academic integrity requirements. Only then will an article be published in an academic journal and evaluated by peers.
- Almost all of these magazines require a subscription fee. However, if the university you attend or work for has provided you with an email account, you can use library subscriptions to databases to gain access to these journals.
- When using the library site's search engine, use the advanced search features to limit the results to peer-reviewed sources.
Step 4. Use all websites wisely
When using any online source other than a university database, you should exercise great caution, because anyone on the internet can post their thoughts, regardless of their value.
- As a general rule, all institutional sites (for example, those with the suffix.gov.it) are trusted, because they are supported by government organizations.
- Websites ending in.com and.org may be reliable sometimes, but not always. In these cases, you will need to search for the body or organization that produced the information. A private individual does not have the credibility required by academic work, unlike a large, established organization, such as the American Medical Association or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- There are also large and famous organizations that are still known for their bias. For example, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (a non-profit organization supporting animal rights) provides only information that supports its cause, while the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (an agency of the Department of the Interior of the United States which deals with wildlife management and conservation) provides the same kind of information in an unbiased way.
- American sites ending in.edu are among those that are "sometimes trustworthy". Often, faculty members teach online courses that include information about their lectures. These sites may feature lecture materials and interpretations of sources. Despite the respectability enjoyed by a university faculty, this information does not go through the peer review process described above. As a result, you will need to take a more cautious approach towards them.
- If possible, look for the same information in a peer-reviewed source, rather than a lecturer's personal.edu site.
Step 5. Avoid self-published material at all costs
If an author is unable to persuade a publisher to publish their ideas, it is probably because they are not particularly relevant. Never quote an author who has self-published their work.
Step 6. Make a distinction between academic and non-academic texts
If an author's manuscript has been accepted for publication, that means someone has found his ideas worthy of exposure. However, there is an important and significant difference between a book published for academic purposes and one that is not.
- Academic texts are written with the sole purpose of informing; they offer new ideas, criticize old ones, and present new facts or theories relevant to an audience of academic researchers. Non-academic books may also deal with university study topics (for example, sociology or politics), but are nevertheless written for the purpose of entertaining a layman audience.
- Academic books are often published by academic publishing houses (such as Amherst College Press) and professional associations (for example, the American Historical Association), while non-academic articles are edited by commercial publishers (such as Houghton Mifflin).
- University texts provide an exhaustive list of references to support their academic credibility, while non-academic ones often make claims that are not supported by reliable sources.
Step 7. Avoid using school textbooks, except to extract general information from them
Textbooks are excellent teaching tools: they condense a great deal of technical information into a language that is easily understood by students approaching the subject in question for the first time. However, they only provide information that has been unanimously accepted by experts in the field. So you shouldn't focus your academic arguments on such obvious news (at least for academics).
From a school textbook, you extract only the general information necessary to lay the foundations for a more original argument
Step 8. Consider how long a source dates back to
Scholarship consists of a constantly evolving body of knowledge, and information that has been revolutionary in the past can turn out to be incorrect or outdated within a few years or even months. Before deciding if an information is reliable in order to use it for your project, always check the publication date of the source.
For example, in recent times such as the 1960s, most academic linguists believed that the colloquial English of African Americans represented an inferior and stunted form of Standard American English, reflecting a lack of cognitive skills on the part of African Americans. In the 1980s and 1990s, most linguists had come to see it as a definite dialectical variation of American English with its own diction and grammatical structure. Within a couple of decades, the whole line of thinking was completely reversed
Step 9. Use unacceptable sources and methods in an acceptable way
So far, many kinds of sources have been discussed that are unacceptable in an academic writing: many internet sites, non-academic books, etc. However, there are a few ways to use them to your advantage without having to mention them.
- Students are always told: "Never use Wikipedia". This is true; There are a large number of reasons why you should never mention Wikipedia: it is written anonymously, thus depriving you of the possibility of verifying the author's trustworthiness, and, moreover, it is continually updated, so that it is not a stable source.
- However, if you find information that may be useful to you, it could be cited in the note and enjoy a more authoritative provenance. If the source cited meets the necessary reliability requirements, read it directly and quote it yourself. Use Wikipedia as a starting point for reaching better sources.
- Do the same with any other website that does not meet the academic integrity requirements.
- If you are unable to find confirmation of a certain piece of information from academic sources, it is a red flag that the information is unreliable and, consequently, you should not include it in your argument.
Step 10. Seek a second opinion
If you belong to any university community, as a student, faculty or staff member, or alumni, check with the literature faculty if you have access to a writing workshop. The staff present will be able to provide you with a professional opinion on the reliability of a given source. If you are a student, show it to your teacher and ask him for his evaluation.
Always seek a second opinion well in advance of your project deadline. If one or more of your sources prove problematic, you will find yourself deleting entire pages of your article and having to scramble for new sources at the last minute
Method 2 of 2: Evaluating the Sources for Everyday Life
Step 1. Evaluate the professionalism of the production
Generally, the more time and money invested in creating and publishing the material, the more likely you are to find reliable information. A poorly designed web page or brochure, or a website covered in unsavory advertisements and pop-ups, is unlikely to provide information from an individual or organization investing in the protection of their image or reputation.
- Look for websites and publications with professional, high-quality finishes.
- This does not mean that any information from a well-packaged source is necessarily reliable. There are reference models to carefully create a website that is cheap and easily available.
Step 2. Read about the author
A source is more reliable if it was written by someone with a degree or other qualifications related to the subject in question. If no author or organization is mentioned, the source should not be considered very credible. However, if the author submits an original work, consider the value of the ideas, not his credentials. Qualifications are never a guarantee of innovation, and the history of science teaches us that great advances tend to come from people outside the field in question, not the establishment. Some questions about the author you should ask are the following:
- Where he works?
- If the author is associated with a reputable institution or organization, what are his or her values and goals? Does it gain an economic advantage from promoting a particular point of view?
- What is your educational background?
- What other works have you published?
- What experiences do you have? Is he an innovator or an advocate and supporter of the status quo?
- Was it cited as a source by other researchers or experts?
- In the case of an anonymous author, you can find out who published the website through the page you find at this address: https://whois.domaintools.com. It will tell you who registered the domain and when, how many others they have and an e-mail address to reach the person or organization at, as well as an ordinary mail address.
Step 3. Check the date
Find out when the source was published or corrected. With regard to some topics, such as those of a scientific nature, it is essential to have up-to-date sources, while in other fields, such as the humanities, it is essential to include older material. It is also possible that you are looking at an older version of the source, while a newer one has been published in the meantime. Check for the availability of more recent versions of academic sources through a university database (or through an online library, in the case of informative sources). If successful, not only should you get the updated version, but you can also have more confidence in the source itself: the more editions and reprints, the more reliable the information.
Step 4. Collect news about the publisher
The institution hosting the information can often tell you a lot about the reliability of the information itself. For example, you should be more confident of information found in the New York Times or the Washington Post (two newspapers with a proven track record of integrity and public retraction of mistakes), rather than a source like Infowars, which enjoys a large readership, but often publishes misleading or blatantly incorrect information.
Step 5. Determine what audience the source is targeting
Before assimilating the information contained in a document, examine its tone, depth and breath. Are these three elements appropriate for your project? Using a source that is too technical and specialized for your needs could lead you to misunderstand the information, which is just as damaging to your credibility as using an unreliable source.
Step 6. Check the reviews
To determine how and why other people have criticized the source in question, you should make use of tools such as Book Review Index, Book Review Digest, and Periodical Abstracts. If the validity of the source is called into question by a significant dispute, you may decide not to use it or to examine it further with more suspicion.
Step 7. Evaluate the sources of the source itself
Citing other reliable sources is a sign of credibility. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to verify that the other sources also demonstrate the same reliability and that they are used in the right context.
Step 8. Identify any bias
If there is a known emotional or economic connection between the author of the source and the subject being discussed, consider the fairness with which the source presents the various points of view. Sometimes, to determine the presence of relationships that indicate possible bias, it is necessary to do some research: check if the author or the institution hosting the publication has been accused in the past of having done some work that contains bias.
- Be aware of word choices that imply the presence of a judgment. Conclusions that describe something as "good" or "bad", or "right" or "wrong", should be examined critically. It is more convenient to describe something according to an objective criterion than to label it with words that represent abstract concepts; for example, "… these and other illegal actions …" is preferable to "… these and other ignoble actions …".
- The first sentence describes the action in legal terms (a somewhat impartial source), while the second example provides a judgment based on the author's belief system.
Step 9. Evaluate consistency
Sources that apply different criteria to those who agree or disagree with them are suspect. If your source praises a politician for "changing his mind to accommodate his constituency" but criticizes one from the other side for "changing his position based on opinion polls," the source is likely be biased.
Step 10. Investigate funding sources for sponsored research
Determine the sources of funding for the work, to get an idea of the influences it may have suffered. Different sources of funding can affect the way information is presented or the way a study is conducted in order to adapt them to their own purposes.
For example, in 2013, the BMJ (a leading British medical journal, formerly called the British Medical Journal) banned all tobacco industry-subsidized research on tobacco from its pages because it determined that the particular interests of financiers would lead to biased conclusions. and unreliable
Advice
- If a source does not meet the criteria described in this article, it does not mean that the information it contains is necessarily false. It just indicates that the source may not be reliable.
- The more radical the ideas presented in one source (compared to other sources regarding the same topic), the more attention you should be examining it. Don't ignore it completely: Gregor Mendel's work was cited only three times, criticized and ignored for 35 years, before his genetic discoveries were recognized by the scientific community.
