Searching and researching smartly
Source criticism does not begin with evaluating, but with searching. Whoever searches badly is served up bad sources. A few habits make the difference.
Searching better
- Choose precise terms. Instead of „is coffee harmful“, better „coffee heart health study review“. Technical terms lead to specialist sources.
- Try several search terms and synonyms, in English too, because the largest bodies of knowledge are in English.
- Use operators: quotation marks for exact phrases (
"artificial scarcity"),site:for a particular site (site:bundestag.de), minus to exclude (jaguar -car). - Apply click restraint: read the list of hits first, then click deliberately (see the SIFT page).
- Beyond the first tab. Very few good pieces of research end on page one of the results.
Search engines do not show „the truth“, but what fits the search terms, your behaviour and the advertising environment. Whoever enters leading terms („evidence that X is dangerous“) promptly gets confirmation: that is confirmation bias as a search query.
Distinguishing types of sources
Not every source is suited to every purpose.
Have you read the latest IPCC report? No? Well, maybe the summary, or a report about the summary, or in fact just a video by your favourite hobby reporter on a video platform (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok ...)?
No harm done! But looking at an original now and then is not a bad idea either.
Roughly, one can distinguish:
- Primary sources: the original, i.e. the study itself, the law in its exact wording, the uncut video, the agency's statistics. The most reliable, but often demanding.
- Secondary sources: the contextualisation, i.e. specialist articles, quality journalism, textbooks that summarise and interpret primary sources.
- Tertiary sources: the overview, i.e. dictionaries, encyclopaedias, reference works. Good to get started, not as an end point.
Rule of thumb: the more important the matter, the closer to the original. A headline about „a new study“ is an invitation to look for the study itself.
Using Wikipedia properly
Wikipedia is the world's most-used source of knowledge, and that is fine, as long as you use it properly: as a starting point, not an end point.
What Wikipedia does well:
- Citation requirement. Wikipedia requires that articles contain only verifiable information from reliable publications; the burden of proof lies with whoever wants to write something into the article (Wikipedia:Verifiability).
- References. The footnotes at the end of the article are a springboard to the original sources.
- Revision history. Every change is traceable: who changed what, and when?
- Talk page. Contested points are negotiated here, a good indicator of controversy.
What you have to be careful about:
- Patrolled/reviewed revisions mean only that someone has checked for obvious vandalism, not that the content is factually correct (Wikipedia:Pending changes).
- On contested or breaking-news topics an article can be briefly one-sided or wrong.
- You do not cite Wikipedia itself in academic work; you follow the references down to the primary source.
How reliable is Wikipedia? A much-cited study in the journal Nature (2005) compared 42 science articles from Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The result: Wikipedia had slightly more errors (around 4 versus 3 per article), but came surprisingly close to the established encyclopaedia (Reliability of Wikipedia). The study is old and concerns only the natural sciences, but it shows: Wikipedia is a good starting point, yet no substitute for a look at the original sources.
Wikipedia is an excellent springboard: get an overview, then follow the footnotes to the primary sources.
A useful side effect: looking up the Wikipedia entry of another source is itself a form of lateral reading: this is how you quickly find out who is behind a newspaper, an association or an institute.