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Successful judgment of accuracy requires some knowledge of the topic. Do you recognize any errors in the facts presented? Are any claims made which you know to be untrue?
The judgment of accuracy must be made carefully to avoid fooling yourself. "Confirmation bias" is the tendency to select or accept information which already states what you believe to be true.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. --Richard Feynman
It is a good practice to make note of discrepancies with what you already believe to be true and then verify the truth from additional sources.
Peer Review
If you do not know very much about a topic, it is more difficult to judge its accuracy. In these cases, you may wish to rely on the judgment of experts. Peer reviewed sources are an easy way to get this.
When a scientific researcher does a study and wishes to distribute it to the world, he often submits his work to a peer reviewed journal. Also called scholarly journals or academic journals, peer reviewed journals have an editorial board of researchers who supervise the publication. The editor of the peer reviewed journal accepts the submission and sends it to other scientists with some expertise on the topic. Usually they themselves and done research and published on this topic or a related topic so they already have experience doing research and expertise on this subject. They review the research study and critique it for quality and errors. The reviewers may recommend (1) that the research is not good and will not be published in their journal, (2) that the submission is not right for their journal but may be appropriate for another journal, (3) that the submission needs some changes and improvements, or (4) that the submission is good and will be accepted for publication in their journal. Only after the research submission is written to their satisfaction and any recognized errors have been fixed will the research be published in the journal.
In contrast, when a paper is submitted to a popular magazine or a newspaper, it is reviewed by the editor, who may not have any expertise in the topic. In addition, the paper is likely to be evaluated for whether it interests the readers of the magazine and whether people will pay to read it. It is not necessarily evaluated for accuracy of scientific information. After all, it is accurate to say that "Mr. Smith reported that the sun revolves around the Earth," regardless of whether it really does because it is true that Mr. Smith made this statement.
Peer review does not guarantee that all of the included information is true. After all, new knowledge is discovered and refined all the time. For years, people believed that the sun revolved around the Earth. But peer review does provide a checkpoint to eliminate clearly poor research.
Peer reviewed publications may be online or in print, but they are most frequently in the form of journals or books. Peer reviewed books are published by a university press (for example: Indiana University Press) or a professional organization (American Society for Microbiology Press). Peer reviewed journals are sometimes conveniently identified for you by the databases.
