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

[Maria E.Gonzalez]

Excellent question and rich area for necessary research.
Let me know what if any of the below helps.

Look at http://credibility.stanford.edu/ to see just one
example of the need for trans/multi/interdisciplinary effort to
tackle this huge issue.
Journalists and legal scholars for obvious reasons in the U.S.
have taken an interest in "cognitive authority" , credibility,
trustworthiness, expertise, etc. Therefore the search strategy
keywords as well as the research outlets/journals/databases for
this area are shifting. Look in new electronic journals for
research publications in this topic.

A handful of think tanks in US are now and have traditionally
dealt with these issues although the descriptors or subject
headings may be different. Authors not publishers often now give
the descriptors, not always controlled by vocabulary of the
database provider. We are now in the full-text world so we have
to find and use the right "buzzwords"
although authority, authorship, credibility, trustworthiness are
still standards in LIS world
A few years ago, Anne C. Weller compiled a monumental
bibliography on peer-review mostly in the sci-tech-med world;
the book could provide many leads re: the other face of the
problem of fraudulence, falsification, and plagiarism

>From my corner of the world, as a newly appointed LIS faculty
member assessing the big picture for the sake of my students, I
see librarians having to bridge the too-real digital divide;
integration of technologies and applications; interfaces,
interoperability, budget magic to stretch dollars, and focus on
supporting the fundamental basics of general public information
literacy (another keyword). In library world, important related
research areas under:
"information seeking behavior" as well as "usability" and
"accessibility"


-- 
Maria E. Gonzalez, PhD
gonzalez at ischool.utexas.edu



Quoting 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
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