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The Importance of Information Evaluation

Information evaluation is a central skill in your both academic work and everyday life.

In your classes at MRU, at some point you will likely be asked to evaluate sources as part of the research process in order to determine whether they are academic (or scholarly) and have undergone the peer-review process.

For additional help with understanding peer review and identifying the characteristics of a peer-reviewed source, check out the Identifying Scholarly Works section on the Types of Information page of this guide.

In everyday life, information evaluation is also extremely important, particularly if you consider the sheer amount of information that we are bombarded with online from a wide variety of different sources, both high quality (or credible) and low quality.

You may have heard terms like misinformation and disinformation in the news over the past couple of years, but what do these terms actually mean, and how can you remain vigilant online when there is so much bad information out there? Learn more below!

 

Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation

Information that is false or inaccurate, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.

Example: Joking with friends about something untrue but funny or unknowingly sharing a social media post or news article with inaccurate or outdated information with someone else.

Information that is false or inaccurate and is deliberately created or shared to mislead or harm a person, social group, organization or country.

Example: Deepfakes, otherwise known as "media manipulations that are based on advanced artificial intelligence (AI), where images, voices, videos or text are digitally altered or fully generated by AI" (Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 2023, p. 13).

Information that is based in reality but often exaggerated or selectively edited and shared to inflict harm on a person, social group, organization, or country.

Example: The sharing of another person's private data or images publicly.

This helpful graphic created by First Draft News illustrates the relationship between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation considered in terms of both falseness and intent to harm.

Image Credit: First Draft News “Understanding Information Disorder,” https://web.archive.org/web/20241009174006/https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/understanding-information-disorder/

The definitions above are sourced from the Canadian Association of Journalists' Misinfo 101 National Guide.

Frameworks for Evaluating Information

In a world full of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation critical evaluation is crucial for ensuring the sources you use provide high-quality, accurate information from multiple perspectives. This is especially the case with the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies and their ability to produce synthetic media that can appear convincing or authoritative, but that is ultimately misleading or fabricated.

Lateral Reading

There are many different tools for evaluating information. Some rely on lateral reading, and others encourage vertical reading.

Lateral reading is, simply put, using the web to fact check itself.

Back in 2018, the Stanford History Education Group (now the Digital Inquiry Group) performed a study comparing the online information evaluation skills of Stanford undergraduates, professors from four different universities, and professional fact checkers.

Whereas the undergraduates and professors spent their time rigorously examining the online source in question by performing a close, “vertical” reading of it, professional fact checkers saved themselves time by doing two things: (1) they looked up the source in question in other online sources like Wikipedia; and (2) they examined news coverage about the organization that authored the source in question to get a sense of the source’s potential biases. By performing those two checks, they vetted the source in question and determined whether it was worth their time in the first place.

This is what is called reading “laterally”—reading across the web by leveraging other sources to perform a quick assessment or fact check of a source in question.

Here is a quick video overview of lateral reading from the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum developed by the Stanford History Education Group (now the Digital Inquiry Group):

SIFT (Mike Caulfield)
Introduces four habits you can use to verify information: (1) Stop, (2) Investigate the source, (3) Find better coverage, and (4) Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.

Evaluating AI Content (U of A)
Provides tips for verifying output from generative AI tools that involve reading AI-generated output laterally.

Vertical Reading

Vertical reading, in contrast, is more of a traditional style of information evaluation where you spend more significant amounts of time with the source that you are evaluating.

Many of the information evaluation tools devised by librarians have typically involved reading vertically.

CRAAP Test (UChicago Library)
Outlines a series of questions to ask of a source in order to determine its Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose.

RADAR (SAIT)
Describes how to use Relevance, Authority, Date, Appearance, and Reason for Creation to evaluate a source.

Reading Laterally or Vertically?

Your decision of whether to focus on performing a lateral or vertical reading of a source will likely depend on your assignment.

For example, if you are working on an assignment where your task is to research and then argue the case either for or against a controversial, current issue like safe injection sites, you will likely want to be reading your sources laterally to try to get a sense of any biases in play on the part of the sources’ authors.

In contrast, if your task is to critically analyze a scholarly article that has been assigned to you already by your instructor, then you may want to focus most of your energy on a vertical reading of the source to really analyze it thoroughly.

Of course, as was mentioned above in the description of the Stanford History Education Group’s study, lateral reading and vertical reading can be powerfully combined as techniques. In the case of combining lateral and vertical reading, the lateral reading acts as a kind of “screening” activity that you perform prior to a more rigorous, vertical reading assessment of a source.

Additional Resources for Evaluating Information

  • InVID-WeVerify Verification Plugin
    • This plugin has been designed as a verification “Swiss army knife” helping journalists, fact-checkers, and human rights defenders to save time and be more efficient in their fact-checking and debunking tasks on social networks especially when verifying videos and images. 
  • Reverse Image Searching tools (Google Images, TinEye, Yandex)
    • These tools allow you to upload an image and to see where else it has been posted online. They can be helpful to attempt to trace an image back to its source.
  • oSoMeNet
    • A tool that visualizes information spreading and sharing patterns on multiple social media platforms. 

License

Much of the content on this Academic Research Skills guide has been adapted from the University of Alberta Library, which shared its guide content under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.