Off The Shelf

While we all know to read critically any information we locate on the free world wide web, sometime there’s a tendency to forget to read critically when it comes to published magazines and journals. Especially when it comes to Peer Reviewed journals, as they are referred to as the Gold Standard of Academic Publishing.

But as shown in this humorous account from professor Dr. Rick Trebino about attempting to publish in one of those journals, there clearly is room for bias and missing opposing voices. Dr. Trebino attempted to publish a comment to a scientific study published in the “most prestigious journal” of his field that he found to have drawn conclusions on badly calculated data. When he attempts to publish a comment pointing out that the study is wrong and how, a very long and ridiculous process ensued.

The reason this sadly funny situation is important is because it points out that bias does exist and some voices are not heard in scholarly publishing, and mistakes do happen and make their way through peer review onto the printed page. Always reading critically looking at the conclusions the researchers have drawn, the research methodology they used and how well they executed it, the data collected, and other aspects of scholarly papers is a good practice. The fact that the paper Dr. Trebino discredited was published in the first place shows that even when a study is reviewed by 3 scholarly reviewers, mistakes do make their way to publication only to be refuted later.

-Sommer

Wikipedia has recently announced that they will be using expert editors on entries for living people.  The general public will no longer be able to change an entry and see it posted immediately.  From now on, an expert editor will have to approve the changes before they go live.

This is designed to avoid some of the problems Wikipedia entries have had due to “vandalism,” where false information is placed in an entry.  Living people, who face personal repercussions from this type of vandalism, are the first to have their entries monitored this way.

While this change affects only Wikipedia, it does highlight some important questions about the internet and collaborative media:

• Who is the author?  Do they have to identify themselves?
• Does the author face any repercussions if they post something that is false, misleading, stolen, etc.?
• Who gains if there is false information provided? Or if the appropriate context is missing?

In many ways the internet is the  “wild west” of the information age.   There are very few gatekeepers to make sure that you are getting what you think you are.  Wikipedia, which started as a free-for-all, is now putting gatekeepers in place. 

But much of the internet is still strictly caveat lector: reader beware!

- Erin

Erin recently blogged Are You Fooled by Bad Resources? Well it turns out journalists and sports reporters who didn’t take time to fact check have found themselves on the foolish side of Wikipedia-based social experiments.

Shane Fitzgerald, an undergraduate student in Ireland, wanted to see what would happen if he posted a fake quote by a recently deceased French music composer. What he expected was to see the contrived quote in online blogs and other informal locations on the Internet. However he found the quote used in newspapers across the globe, including “obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers.” (From May 6, 2009 Irish Times article)

Fitzgerald said, “He wanted to show how journalists use the internet as a primary source and how people are connected especially through the internet…” (From May 6, 2009 Irish Times article).  No one actually discovered the hoax until Fitzgerald himself alerted the offending newspapers of their faux pas. Fitzgerald emphasized that he’s not necessarily technologically savvy, proving that anyone with a computer and Internet connection can change the content of Wikipedia.

Earlier this year another Wikipedia hoax fooled British sports news reporters. A fake soccer phenom from Moldova was concocted and the British newspapers bit: Inside the ingenious hoax that fooled the British sports press.

In the soccer hoax a blogger thought something was fishy and he looked at Wikipedia history pages (where you can view all of the edits done to a Wikipedia page) and tapped other sources in the know and discovered the truth. There was no phenom Moldovan soccer player named Masal Bugduv.

This all goes to show how wary one must be when viewing content on the Internet. It’s important not to take things at face value and do a little investigating and critically evaluate information. It’s also good to keep in mind that many published newspapers and magazines with tight deadlines and budgets don’t always take the time to thoroughly fact check their content.

What can you do? Look for story retractions in later issues, or find other resources that reported the same story. But check their sources. Do a Google search of that quote or story. If it comes up with a page from Wikipedia that includes a quote or information without a reference attached, then be wary.

While Wikipedia can be useful for background information, it should never be cited or used as a source. Use it for keywords, not for content.

No discussion about Wikipedia would be complete without a visit from Stephen Colbert, the inventor of the term Wikiality. Here’s the video of Stephen Colbert’s take on Wikipedia from the segment of his show (The Colbert Report) called The Word: The Word – Wikiality.

From The Colbert Nation: http://www.colbertnation.com/

-Sommer

A blog at The Scientist magazine recently reported on a “fake” peer-reviewed journal that drug manufacturer Merck created along with the help of well-known academic publisher Elsevier. The journal was handed out to medical professionals as a way to advertise several Merck products.

The journal in question, the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, had the appearance of a typical scholarly journal, but it wasn’t.

It may have fooled a few doctors, but knowledgeable researchers could quickly tell that it wasn’t what it appeared to be.

What tipped them off?

• It wasn’t indexed in MEDLINE, the database a researcher would expect to see it indexed in.
• There was no website where researchers could find further information about the journal’s contents or submission procedures.
• The ads and articles were weighted heavily toward Merck products.
• Review and meta-analysis articles had very few references.

Could you spot a bogus journal or article?

We all like to think that we’re hard to fool, but unless you have a strong understanding of the literature in your field, you may actually be pretty gullible. The Capella librarians are often asked questions about how to analyze an article, and we often see articles that aren’t up to the standards that learners want to use.

While it’s unlikely that you’ll run across a journal purposely designed to fool you, there are other items that you should avoid using when doing scholarly research:

• Course papers by other students. These are all over the web, some even listed in Google Scholar.
• Non-peer-reviewed content from peer-reviewed journals. Things like book reviews and commentaries are in the journal, but not peer-reviewed themselves.
• Websites on your topic. They are tempting because they’ll often give a nice overview of a topic, and may even be by an expert. But they are NOT the same as a scholarly article that is posted to the internet.
• Marketing articles. Just as with Merck, many companies use articles or newsletters to advertise their services or products. They mix marketing messages with more general information to pull in readers and subtly influence them.
• Trade journals. Don’t get me wrong, trade journals and other professional literature are great, but they’re not the same as a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. You need to make sure you have the right resource for the task at hand.

Of course, the best way to protect yourself from being fooled is knowledge. Know what scholarly articles look like. Know what is going on in your field. Know who might want to fool you.

- Erin

Evaluating what you read is an important skill you have to demonstrate as a learner. In some courses you may even have to turn in an evaluation of an article as a course assignment. Are you worried about what you’re expected to say? Feel you’ve never evaluated an article before?

It’s not that hard. In fact, you’re using your information evaluation skills every day, and have been for most of your life.

Every day you encounter news reports, stories, advice, and opinions from a variety of sources. You can’t possibly believe every single source equally – how would you deal with conflicting information? Instead you determine who is the most credible based on what you know about their expertise and experience.

Evaluating journal articles is very similar. You may not have a lot of personal knowledge about the authors or editors of the journal, but there are important clues within the article itself:

• author affiliations or degrees
• the subject focus of the publication
• how arguments are supported (quotes from other experts, references and citations, etc.)

Other aspects of evaluation require some extra legwork on your part, or greater experience in the field:

• are there other articles on the topic by the same author?
• the reputation of the publication
• how radical the ideas in the paper are compared to the current consensus in the field (being a lone voice doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong, but it does require more evidence because it can’t piggy-back on the mountains of evidence provided by others)

As undergraduate and graduate learners, you have an extra layer of evaluation: you have to determine how scholarly something is. Scholarly research requires scholarly sources. And the higher your degree program, the more scholarly your sources must be. Some guy at your bus stop may know a lot about your dissertation topic, but you won’t want to quote him unless he’s published his ideas in a scholarly journal.

For more help with evaluating articles, see our Evaluating section of the Library Research Handbook.

- Erin

When the web first became a household word in the 1990s, dates weren’t all that important.  The web was so new that everything on it must be new, too.

Early in the 2000s dates weren’t all that important, either.  Old sites looked, well, old fashioned.  It was easy to pick out a website that had been around for a while – it had poor graphics, mostly text, and usually garish colors.  New sites, even ones by web novices, looked polished. 

Now that everyone’s been producing professional-looking websites for a few years, it’s hard to tell what’s recent from what’s ancient.  And many sites have failed to properly date their material.

That may not seem like a big deal, but it can cause real problems when timely information is everything.  Just recently United Airlines stock spiraled downwards after Google picked up an old newspaper story and slapped a recent date to it.  You can hear the play by play from a public radio report as Google found an old story, changed the date, and everyone else took Google’s word for it.

Many have blamed the original newspaper story for not having a date on it, but it appears Google is redating articles even when they have a date!  This isn’t necessarily malicious, but it does show just how easy it is for things to get messed up in an automated world.

So, what can the average web user do to stop being taken in?

1. Stay informed about current events and the world.  If you know that United Airlines filed for bankruptcy a few years ago, you might question its happening again so soon.  General knowledge helps you identify things that seem fishy.
2. Be a little skeptical about everything you see online.  The internet is full of jokesters, scammers, automated processes and orphaned content.  Any of these can result in misleading information. 
3. Research, fact check, and confirm.  We’ve posted about helpful sites like Snopes before, but not all misleading internet information rises to the level of an urban legend.  Many are just banal mistakes (or lies) that can make you look stupid, but rarely touch more than a few dozen people.

So, what would you do if you saw the following on the internet?  Believe it, or check it out?  And would you know where to go to find the answer?

• A hundred years ago, only 20% of Americans were literate. 
• The United States has never been invaded by another country.
• There’s current evidence of enough oil in Alaska to power all U.S. homes and cars for 100 years.

So, there’s the challenge.  What does your “gut” tell you, and how do you confirm it? 

- Erin

A recent article from the BBC News stated: “The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science…” I have a strong doubt we will ever achieve an ideal, factual Internet, so in the meantime we’ll need to continue to use critical thought and evaluative skills to ensure the information we come across on the Internet and through forwarded emails is accurate.

Because the Internet allows anyone with a computer to create content and spread information, it would be difficult if not impossible to regulate it to separate fact from fiction. In this post I recommend some nonpartisan resources that will help you separate fact from fiction this election year.

Because this is a presidential election year, you’re probably finding your email inbox inundated with forwarded emails from concerned friends and relatives regarding the political candidates. A report from factcheck.org cites multiple instances of popular email forwards being mostly or totally bogus. While this certainly applies to the political candidates, there are multiple examples of rumors spread just by forwarding an email without first checking the facts.

Did you hear the one about the U.K. (University of Kentucky depending on the version) cutting the Holocaust out of their curriculum due to it being offensive to Muslims? Bogus! The report from factcheck.org says, “A simple Google search reveals the falsity of the rumor, yet the e-mail continues to be passed along by the overly credulous.”

Or how about the one that claims to be an essay by Jay Leno, and more recent versions cite David Letterman, urging people to focus on the positive. Bogus! It was actually written by columnist Craig R. Smith for WorldNetDaily in 2006. But the originator of the false email probably knew people were less likely to pass on something written by Mr. Smith, so they attributed a celebrity as author. It worked! It’s still in circulation today and will be until people stop forwarding false information.

Similar to the Jay Leno example is the widely circulated “commentary” by Andy Rooney. Andy Rooney has stated multiple times that it was not his work, but yet the email lives due to careless email forwarding.

But also take those campaign ads on television with a grain (or shaker full) of salt. Political campaigns are notorious for distorting facts. For example a recent McCain ad claiming Obama wants to teach “comprehensive sex education” to kindergarteners was debunked by the facts, showing how they had been distorted. FactCheck.

On the other side an Obama ad distorted information to paint a more negative picture of McCain’s education voting record. FactCheck.

So how do you protect yourself from passing on misinformation? And more importantly, how do you protect yourself from believing bad information? Arm yourself with some resources from nonpartisan organizations who do the fact checking for you:

• FactCheck.org
• PolitiFact.com

• Snopes.com
• Urban Legends from About.com

FactCheck.org created a special wire for the election season, which they claim is “Faster than the speed of Spin.” Check it out: FactCheck Wire.

Remember, the type of resource matters. Below are the most common sources people use for political information that will require various levels of skepticism and fact checking:

• Newspapers and popular magazines include articles that are quickly fact checked, but due to quick deadlines can include inaccuracies. Newspapers have a reputation to uphold, so they have more incentive to report the facts, but no media is perfect.
• Television ads are required to include an approval statement by the candidate, however there is no fact checking done by the network running the ad. Political campaigns distort facts because they know that most people will believe the ad and not take the time to check if what it claimed is true.
• Blogs are opinion pieces not reviewed by editors or fact checkers. Anyone can start a blog and there’s no rule requiring accurate information.
• Forwarded Emails are usually distortions of facts including false information. Ask yourself why you’re finding out the information from an email as opposed to the News – it’s not because someone knows something the media is ignoring, but because the media has probably already investigated it and found the claim false.

-Sommer

A lot of learners start their research on the web, perhaps with a search engine such as Google. Type in just about any topic and you’re sure to get hundreds, if not thousands, of results.

But how good are those results? With most search results you are taken to a web page full of links, statements of responsibility, and other information you can use to evaluate the legitimacy of the resource. But not all search results take you to full websites.

One type of result that that can be especially confusing is the PDF. Click it in your Google results list and an entire article appears, but there’s very little information beyond what’s on that PDF image of the page. There may be a name, title, and text, but nothing else.

Why is this problematic?

You have no idea what the “article” actually is. It could be any of the following:

• a paper presented at a conference.
• a research report from a respected think tank.
• an article published in a journal.

OR

• the random thoughts of some guy with an internet connection.
• a lazy freshman’s half-plagiarized term paper.
• outright lies meant to confuse others or push a particular agenda.

OR

• a self-published article by someone who knows a lot about the topic, but has no formal credentials.
• a research paper by an advanced graduate student.
• an article that was rejected by the journals the author submitted it to.

It’s obvious that the articles from group one are worthy of consideration for your research. Group two should be avoided at all costs. But what about group three? And how do you know which category a PDF article fits into?

A good rule of thumb is to only use resources by people who are more credible on the topic than you are. If you can’t tell, err on the side of caution.

To help you make that determination, try to learn as much as possible about the author and origin of the article. Here are some tricks you can try:

• Check Google Scholar to see if anyone has cited it.
• Look closely at the web address. Check the root address of the site to learn more about the author or sponsoring body.
• Google the author’s name and look for other publications or a CV.
• Examine the PDF for information that would indicate it was originally published in a journal or presented at a conference. Then confirm that fact with the conference’s website or journal’s table of contents.

One word of caution: many learners restrict their searches to .edu sites. While that can be helpful, only real evaluation of a website will tell you if you’ve found something from a world-reknowned professor or his worst student. Both can post to .edu websites.

- Erin