MARITIME HISTORY ON THE INTERNET
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by Peter McCracken
Identifying Reliable Information Online
ow do you determine the reliability of a particular information source? This question grows more important every day, as numerous organizations and bad actors seek financial and political gain through misrepresentation and misinformation campaigns. To be sure, reliable sources sometimes inadvertently provide inaccurate information, but nearly always, those sources will publicize corrections and rescissions when that happens. Nevertheless, an important part of finding and using reliable information involves locating and starting with trustworthy sources. The most basic form of information is data, such as statistical information collected about a particular subject. When looking for reliable sources of data-based information, I find it useful to consider the question “Who would collect this information?” followed by “Where would they publish it?” Statistics and data reflect those who collect it, and often no one has spent the time and money to collect the data that you might be seeking. Or perhaps organizations have collected the data, but they have no interest in sharing that information outside their organization. When data is available—oftentimes at a high cost—it may well come with extensive biases built in. As a hypothetical example, consider someone seeking information about the amount or value of goods being shipped from a given port. A company that offers shipping services might be inclined to under-report how much leaves the port in question to make their portion of it appear bigger. An organization trying to highlight environmental damage as a result of that shipping might lean towards over-reporting such information, to bring more attention to the issue. A chamber of commerce might also overreport, to improve outsiders’ opinions of the port. While government sources are certainly not infallible, they often provide the least-biased information and are generally in the public domain. For the presentation of scholarly information, the standard is peer-reviewed articles, which interpret the available data in ways that meet scholarly, academic, and scientific rigor. There’s no question that scientists and scholars get things wrong—sometimes intentionally, most times not—but a responsible publication will retract or revise articles that are found to be erroneous. Retraction Watch (https://retractionwatch.com) reports on such topics through regular and weekly updates. It can be surprising—and a bit distressing—to discover how many significant articles are retracted each year.
As described in my previous column about Open Access publishing, some disingenuous journals will publish anything, as long as the authors pay fees to get their articles published. The result is that these so-called “peer-reviewed” articles have not actually been reviewed by the author’s peers. Because of this, the journal’s history (and particularly the organization that publishes it) serves as an important indicator of the value of the content that appears in its publication. For those not familiar with a particular academic specialty, it can be very difficult to differentiate between valid journals and predatory ones. One identifier of a quality journal is if it has been indexed in major citation indexes, such as Web of Science, Scopus, or subject-specific indexes. An anonymous group called Stop Predatory Journals lists many of the fake journals at https://predatoryjournals.com/ journals. When it comes to news, and especially information presented under the heading of opinion, the prospects are even worse. One of the best ways of identifying reliable sources is to look for a publication’s or a website’s corrections pages. While some might feel that the Corrections section is obvious proof that a resource is unreliable, in fact the organization that admits to its errors is one that can be trusted. The New York Times (https://www. nytimes.com/section/corrections) and Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/news/column/corrections) offer links from their home pages to corrections pages, but most other news resources do not. As we have all learned, automated tools can create and propagate false information to sway large groups of people. But technology can also be used to identify similar false information, whether produced en masse or by individuals. Reporter’s Lab, at https://reporterslab.org, for example, identifies fact-checking tools from around the world, and that organization is developing its own tools to provide real-time fact-checking. The remarkable ease with which anyone can create content— sometimes based on nothing at all—makes it harder for us to identify the most valuable, accurate, and useful content. Every reader and every researcher should be as careful as possible when evaluating sources, to ensure they are working with accurate and reliable information. Suggestions for other sites worth mentioning are welcome at peter@shipindex.org. See https://shipindex.org for a free compilation of over 150,000 ship names from indexes to dozens of books and journals.
Model Ships by Ray Guinta P.O. Box 74 Leonia, NJ 07605 201-461-5729 www.modelshipsbyrayguinta.com e-mail: raymondguinta@aol.com Experienced ship model maker who has been commissioned by the National Maritime Historical Society and the USS Intrepid Museum in NYC. 46
SEA HISTORY 167, SUMMER 2019