Biology & Microbiology: Evaluating Your Sources

When researching and reporting on a topic, the expectation is that you will find reliable sources to support your argument and/or conclusions. But what exactly does that mean? What makes a source reliable?

When talking about reliability (also called authority), we're usually talking about trustworthiness. We want to trust that the resources we use are accurate, and a big consideration in determining trust involves the author(s):

• Who wrote the information?
• What qualifies them to do so?
• Do others recognize their authority on this subject?

Academics and/or those with advanced degrees are typically considered the pinnacle of the expertise hierarchy, because they generally have years of education and experience with the topic in question.

Now, that's not to say that all academics are trustworthy (e.g., David Irving was considered an expert in World War II history until it came to light that throughout his career, he deliberately misrepresented and falsified evidence), or that non-academics aren't trustworthy (e.g., the reporter Walter Cronkite was considered for years "the most trusted man in America"), or that an academic who is an authority in one field is an authority in another (e.g., Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, would not be considered an authority on nutrition). It's all about context. 

So how do you determine whether an author is reliable? You generally want to do some fact-checking. Google the author's name. See what their background is, what their qualifications are. Try to find out what others, particularly those in their peer group, say about them. This is called "lateral reading", and it's a technique used  by professional fact-checkers.

The readings linked below provide some additional information on what lateral reading is and give some tips for evaluating sources.

Something to keep in mind: website domains (i.e., the suffix after the first part, ".com", ".gov", ".org", etc.) don't really mean much these days as far as authority is concerned.

It used to be that you could judge the content of a website based on the domain reasonably well, but this is no longer the case. ANYONE can buy a domain and name it whatever they want.

Focus on evaluating the content of the page, and not the website you find that content on.

Not everything that is reliable or authoritative is peer-reviewed, and not everything that is peer-reviewed is authoritative. These are two related but distinct concepts.

The video below goes into more detail about how you should approach the concepts of authority and levels of review.

Depending on where you are in your education, you may or may not need to worry about this too much. For the most part, undergraduate students can and should assume that any peer-reviewed information they find is authoritative unless you have clear evidence to the contrary. 

Graduate students and faculty should approach their readings with more skepticism because they have a lot more background knowledge about what makes for reliable research in their fields.

One great resource to look at if you are concerned about a source is Retraction Watch. This organization is a watchdog group that tracks scientific conduct and article retractions. Journals themselves do not have a great track record for keeping their readers informed of these things, and Retraction Watch has stepped into this void.