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90% of everything is garbage!
—Theodore Sturgeon
"90% of everything" might be an exaggeration, but sadly, there is a lot of garbage out there. If you carefully evaluate your sources to make sure they are credible, you stand to save yourself a lot of trouble.
IN CONTEXT
Here's a cautionary tale: Iranian news outlet Fars became a laughingstock after it picked up an American news story claiming that the majority of white Americans in rural areas would rather vote for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than President Barack Obama. That doesn't sound quite right, does it? Of course, the original story came from The Onion, a satirical newspaper. If the journalists at Fars had checked out their source, they could have avoided an embarrassing mistake. Use your critical thinking skills to make sure you understand the context of your research!
Reliable sources must be strong enough to support the claim. A lightweight source may sometimes be acceptable for a lightweight claim, but never for an extraordinary claim.
Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for checking the facts or with no editorial oversight. Such sources include websites and publications expressing views that are widely acknowledged as extremist, that are promotional, or that rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions.
Questionable sources are generally unsuitable for citing contentious claims about third parties, which include claims against institutions, persons living or dead, as well as more ill-defined entities. The proper uses of a questionable source are minimal.
Sometimes "non-neutral" sources are the best possible sources for supporting information about the different viewpoints held on a subject. When dealing with a potentially biased source, editors should consider whether the source meets the standard requirements for reliable sources, such as editorial control and a reputation for fact checking.
Editors should also consider whether the bias makes it appropriate to use in-text attribution to the source. Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made and is an appropriate source for that content. Generally, the more people are engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication.
Not every source is a source you should use. Many seemingly useful sources contain bias and even outright disinformation. Once you find a source on your topic, it’s important that you can evaluate its credibility.
News sources often contain factual and opinion content. News reporting from less established outlets is generally considered less reliable for statements of fact.
Editorial commentary, analysis, and opinion pieces, whether written by the editors of the publication (editorials) or outside authors (op-eds), are reliable primary sources for statements attributed to that editor or author but are rarely reliable for statements of fact. When taking information from opinion content, the identity of the author may help determine reliability. The opinions of specialists and recognized experts are more likely to be reliable and reflect a significant viewpoint.
For information about academic topics, scholarly sources and high-quality non-scholarly sources are generally better than news reports. News reports may be acceptable depending on the context.
Articles which deal in depth with specific studies, such as a specialized article on science, are apt to be of more value than general articles which only tangentially deal with a topic. Frequently, although not always, such articles are written by specialist writers who may be cited by name.
The most significant advantage of using the internet as a research tool is the ease with which you can find information. The most significant disadvantage, then, is parsing through the bevy of information to find credible, reliable, accurate information. The burden of filtering truth from fiction in your internet searches lies solely with you as the researcher.
The first thing to understand about using the internet as a source of information is that search engines are biased gateways to the information you seek. This bias may be driven by proprietary search algorithms dictated by corporate sponsors, ad revenue, and even politics, thus affecting the type of search results your queries will display. Understand that just because you're searching for something on a popular search engine doesn't mean you're getting the full spectrum of available information from your search query.
When searching for reliable information on the internet, there are several questions you should ask yourself with each source of information you find. This may seem tedious, but you don't want your thesis to be undone by someone questioning the credibility of your research, or worse, you as a speaker.
The ADAM approach is an acronym to help you remember the four most important things to consider when evaluating the quality of your materials found via the internet:
Sometimes, the clue to a website's authenticity and credibility is within the actual website address itself. The following top-level domains (TLD) can give you an idea of how reliable and accurate the information may be:
Audio, video, and multimedia materials that have been recorded, then broadcast, distributed, or archived by a reputable party may also meet the necessary criteria to be considered reliable sources.
Like text sources, media sources must be produced by a reliable third party and be properly cited. Additionally, an archived copy of the media must exist. It is convenient, but by no means necessary, for the archived copy to be accessible via the internet.
The rapid growth of social media and its ability to disseminate relevant information to multiple users based on shared interests and relationships has increased its importance in the world of internet research. Wikipedia, one of the most popular wiki websites in the world, relies on scholarly material and crowdsourcing to provide accurate, targeted, and comprehensive information to the masses.
When using social media sources, researchers should be aware of sites that have a poor reputation for checking facts or for moderating content. Such sources also attract publishers expressing extremist views, promoting products, or posting false and inaccurate information.
For that reason, self-published media—whether e-books, newsletters, open wikis, blogs, social networking pages, internet forum postings, or tweets—should be used with caution. Self-published material may be acceptable when it has been produced by an established expert on the topic at hand, and whose work in the relevant field has been previously published by reliable third-party publications.
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