Good vs. Bad Secondary Sources

This is the Digital Age. We are bombarded with information all the time, whether or not we solicit it. This is news to no one. (Case and point: you’re on a blog.) This means that where once students, academics, and everyone else could bemoan the difficulty of accessing information, we all now get to bemoan the glut of information we have to wade through to find what we need/want. Such is the nature of things.

It seems like a topic barely worth mentioning; “you can’t believe everything you see on TV or read on the Internet.” Obviously. I think (I sincerely hope) we’ve all learned to mistrust those banners claiming to help you “legally” earn $1600 in an hour. But what about the subtler shades of deception? What about sources that look reputable? How do you distinguish the chaff from the wheat?

Wikipedia is the classic example of a source that appears to be incredibly handy but is in fact fraught with peril for the researcher. It’s an open source, which means anyone can edit it. (Again, this is not news. But you would be surprised by the number of people who are caught out by using Wikipedia as their hub of information.) I’ll deal with Wikipedia specifically in a later post, but for now, suffice it to say that while Wikipedia is not a bad place to start, you’re in trouble if you take it as gospel.

Facts are generally inherently unstable; there’s a principle, discussed primarily in science, called “the half-life of knowledge.” Basically, it states that within a certain amount of time, a percentage of knowledge which was once believed to be true will be shown to be untrue, or not quite true. So it’s important to remember that no source is infallible. Based on many, many years of researching (History major over here) here are some tips that I hope will be useful, particularly when it comes to online research.

• Check the date of publication. When I was in high school, I was taught to use secondary sources more than twenty years old sparingly. The hope is that those older works have been absorbed and/or challenged and refined by newer works which will hopefully be more accurate (or at least more accurate for the present; knowledge is fluid, and like all of us, it is shaped by the times it comes from). On the other hand, newness is not always greatness. Don’t lock yourself onto one particular source just because it’s new. Personally, I really like second, third, fourth editions; it shows that the author has had a chance to go back and amend the work to increase the shelf life of the knowledge they’re sharing.
• Check the publisher. You can generally be a little more confident of an institutional source like a university than you can of an independent website; the stakes are generally higher for an institution to be accurate than they are for an individual (bad information leads to a bad reputation, which, for an institution, leads to less funding. Believe me, they are all about the funding).
• Check your source’s sources. Firstly, I would really hope that the source you’re looking at has sources of its own (if it’s an institutional source, there may not be any listed because they could be working from their own research, but aside from that, you want to see evidence that they’ve done some reading). Secondly, you’d ideally want to see at least one primary source in there. Thirdly, while lots of sources cited isn’t necessarily an indicator of a high quality source, it’s certainly a good thing.
•  See if it’s a source that’s been peer-reviewed or cited in other academic works. If it’s a piece that other published works have used, you can feel a little more confident about its accuracy. Determining whether or not your source has been used academically can be tricky if you don’t have a subscription to a serious database (like JSTOR, for example). If you don’t, there’s good news. At your local library, there will probably be a research desk, and the librarians do have access to serious databases, which they can generally help you use. There are various free article databases available (more on this later), and the good ones will show you this sort of thing.
• Use common sense. I know, I know, but common sense can be uncommon, and there’s also just good old inexperience. Looks aren’t everything, but I feel better about a source that has functioning links (if it’s online), a clean layout, uses proper citation, and, of course, correct spelling and grammar. You can expect some awkwardness of language if the work has been translated, which doesn’t necessarily rule it out, but a good translation (i.e. an academic translation) would compensate for that. If the translated work you’re looking at hasn’t made the text viable in English, I would suggest you don’t rely too heavily on it.
•  Compare its information to other sources. If you have one source telling you something radically different from at least three others, I would question the one. (For example, if three out of four sources claim a high consumption of delicious milk chocolate is injurious to health and wellbeing overall, but one source claims milk chocolate has healing properties, see if there’s a reason for the one source being so different. Is it perhaps a study being funded by the Chocolatiers of Toronto? Is it perhaps a brand new study, or an incomplete study which might need more refining?) There are some broad exceptions to this rule:

o   Numerical figures. There are many variables that go into forming numerical figures (if you don’t believe me, just look at the U.S. estimations of the casualties, deaths, and property damage resulting from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki versus the Japanese figures). Depending on the source, numerical figures can vary radically. I suggest generally choosing a middle ground, including the qualification “approximately,” or providing a range.

o   Statistics. Statistics are out-of-date the moment they’re created because they represent a very specific window in time. In my experience, they’re very inconsistent and thus can be made to say whatever it serves the author to have them say. I personally think they’re one of the least reliable forms of information, but they are intrinsic to some disciplines, and thus, I suggest the same as above: middle ground, “approximately,” or a range.

I’ll be following up this post in a few days with some links to good databases.

In a thousand years’ time, we may look as stupid for thinking green tea is healthy as we often think our predecessors were for believing the world was flat. Half-life of knowledge, my friends! If you’ve done your due diligence to ensure that the information you’re taking in and/or proliferating is correct, you’ve done your best, and that’s all anyone can do.

Happy learning!