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

[Dan Perkel]

Not sure if this gets at "criteria" but the chapters in this book may  
cite others that get you where you want to go. They are all free  
downloads.

Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/dmal/-/2

I believe that there are a number of "web credibility" projects out  
there as well, but it sounds like you are aware of them.

Dan

Dan Perkel
PhD Candidate, School of Information
University of California, Berkeley
dperkel at ischool.berkeley.edu
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dperkel
http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu

On Sep 11, 2008, at 9:04 PM, Fiona Bradley wrote:

> 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
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