You can’t trust everything you find on the Internet, or even everything you hear on television or radio. Everyone who makes an argument might potentially have an agenda or bias. Sometimes they state their bias clearly up front. Other times, people might hide their agenda, distort facts, or even fabricate information. Politicians as well as journalists and scientists have been found guilty of fabricating evidence.
Honing your information literacy means learning how to investigate and evaluate sources for yourself, rather than relying on other people. A handful of effective strategies exist for determining whether or not to trust a source. Given the rise of fake news, we need these strategies now more than ever.
Librarians and information literacy specialists have developed a list of questions to help us evaluate sources we come across and named it the CRAAP test, to make them easier to remember:
Currency
When was the article or information published or updated?
Is the information in the post likely to change?
Is it tied to a specific year or event that’s still relevant?
Do the links work?
Relevance
How does the information pertain to your topic?
Does it address specific questions you have?
Who was this piece written for?
What age group does it address?
How does it compare to other sources you’ve found?
Authority
Who is the author?
Can you find a biography blurb or statement?
What qualifications or credentials does the author have?
Can you find contact information of any kind?
Accuracy
What evidence does the piece cite?
What’s the source of the information?
Can you verify evidence on other sources?
Does the tone sound objective?
How many spelling and grammar errors do you see?
Purpose
Can you determine a clear purpose such as persuasion, information, entertainment, or marketing?
Does the author announce any explicit purpose?
Do you detect any ulterior motives?
What perspective is author writing from?
Can you tell anything about the author’s background?
Do you note any political, cultural, or religious biases?
Test Case
Using these questions, you can usually tell within a few minutes if an article you find on the web qualifies as a good source for your research. Other times, making that determination takes longer. An entire middle ground exists between extremely trustworthy sources and untrustworthy ones. Consider this blog post by Brad Dieter titled, “Vaccines and Autism.”
Let’s say we’ve come across this article while doing a Google search on the vaccine controversy. At first, it’s hard to tell the legitimacy of the source. But we can run through the CRAAP questions to help. First, we can see that the article at least satisfies the currency criteria, since it was published in August, 2017. We can also see that Brad Dieter has a PhD in Health and Disease. On the other hand, we can’t find a full bio statement or profile picture of the author. Looking elsewhere online, we do find information confirming someone with the name name. The relative lack of information might make many people skeptical.
Next, we consider the article’s tone and use of evidence. The author begins the post with a relatively informal paragraph about his personal life. He also cautions readers up front that he is not an immunologist, and therefore his post shouldn’t be taken as “a hard core science piece,” and that he may biases. Although the post does contain some informal discussion about different worldviews, the author does finally discuss the history of the vaccine-autism debate and cites a number of reliable studies. Overall, the purpose of the piece seems to be informing general audiences about the disagreements and explaining why so many people blame vaccines for the rise in autism.
Our final step would be to examine the website itself, Science Driven Nutrition. Little information about this site appears on the home page. We don’t know if this website is part of a larger publication, institute, university, or organization. Clicking on the other articles, we find only the same author. So while the website appears well designed and informative, our evaluation clearly shows that this is a personal website on nutrition. The person who runs it may be a trustworthy professional, but we should not cite these sources in formal research papers. We would be better off tracking down the articles he cites and using them for the paper–not necessarily this specific piece.