[Air-L] Research on critical evaluation of internet information?

[Fiona Bradley]

Many thanks to all those who contacted me on list and off about this
question. I now have some excellent starting points for beginning
research on this topic from several different angles, and I will be
sure to post back with any significant findings.

regards,
Fiona

2008/9/12 Fiona Bradley <blisspix at gmail.com>:
> Is anyone aware of recent research on criteria to evaluate online
> information, especially if aimed at resarchers and students?
>
> For many years, libraries have been providing guides to evaluating
> information on the Internet that asks students to look at the URL (is
> it .com or .gov? is it a personal or organiation site?), the published
> date, the existance of an author byline etc as critiera to evalute
> online information.  These criteria are perhaps becoming a little too
> simplistic now to really evaluate a site and in many cases can be
> misleading – especially with the rise of academic blogging, online
> datasets, preprint archives, association sites etc which fall out of
> these boxes.
>
> I'm having difficulty finding critiera that goes beyond looking at the
> URL, authorship and page design and which looks at appraising all
> types of information whether printed or online, and evaluating the
> quality of peer review, accuracy of datasets and statistics and so on.
> Is anyone aware of work in defining evaluation criteria that can be
> used by researchers, academics and students? I am aware of some
> studies of critiera for consumer health sites but I'm more interested
> in appraisal for the purposes of citing information in research or
> student papers.
>
> thanks,
> Fiona Bradley
>
> Information Services Librarian
> University of Technology, Sydney
>