.Information Literacy in the Sciences

When you start looking for information on science, you want to find accurate, reliable information, not just any old idea somebody shared on social media. So how do you distinguish the good from the bad?

Well, let's establish that learning a discipline like science involves learning something about how the experts and practitioners in that discipline decide what is accurate and true. And it can take some time to develop the knowledge and skills to do this. But you can learn some skills right away.

A good start for any critical thinker is to become familiar with logical fallacies. These are errors in reasoning that can be applied to evaluate a statement, claim, assertion, or argument. Some logical fallacies were developed by Aristotle and other ancient Greek philosophers, so they are quite old and well established. Sources can be found on the Internet, in books, and in articles. Old sources about logical fallacies are likely to still be good explanations for you.

If learn to look for violations of logical fallacies, you can reduce the likelihood of being fooled. You can also improve your own arguments and make your ideas more persuasive.

While you are gaining knowledge and skills, a fallback method to evaluating information is to identify people who are experts and sources by experts on your chosen topic. If you are not an expert, you could at least find out what the experts are saying.

So how do you determine who is an expert? When discussing expertise, professors and librarians sometimes talk about who has authority over the source or who is the author. Then one can evaluate that person's knowledge and expertise on the selected topic. 

Realize that if you major in a subject, you are attempting to become an expert and practitioner of that subject discipline. You will learn even more from the professors about how they determine expertise and what is accurate. You will gain more skills and knowledge in that subject than non-experts and non-practitioners of that subject discipline.

See "Evaluation of Scientific Information: Authority" for more information.

Experts and practitioners of that scientific disciplines tend to publish primarily in scholarly peer-reviewed journals. So a student can immediately eliminate some junk by preferring articles from scholarly peer-reviewed journals.

See "Scholarly (Peer Review) vs Popular" for more information.

There are some tools and mnemonics that can be used to help remind yourself what questions to ask when evaluating scientific information. Notice that you may encounter variations of the mnemonic tool. This is because tools can be improved and adapted to suit your needs and your memory. If your professor asks you to use a specific tool or mnemonic for your assignment, be sure to do the assignment as requested. 

The CRAAP Test stands for currency, relevancy, accuracy, authorship/authority, and purpose (bias).

Five Ws and an H stands for who, what, where, when, and how. This mnemonic is popularly used by journalists when remembering questions to ask when gathering information on a news story.

Critical appraisal is a method to evaluate research studies for accuracy, reliability, value, and relevance. Critical appraisal is used in the health sciences. Critical appraisal tools often take the form of a checklist of questions to be asked of research studies that use specific methods or protocols. However, critical appraisal often requires some advanced knowledge of good research practice. Don't let that stop you from taking a first look at critical appraisal checklists and thinking about the questions to be asked.