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Authority: Resources

This guide will help you better understand authority in the context of research and information and provide you with methods of evaluating an information source to determine its authority.
Last Updated: Jan 8, 2024 3:31 PM

Further Reading and Investigation

After engaging with the information, resources and tools on the rest of this guide, feel free to explore some of the additional content here. Search the UB Libraries for more information, browse through some of the highlighted books, explore additional checklists and more.

And when in doubt, Ask a Librarian for help!

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Library Catalog

Book cover

Virtues of Openness

Should all academic writings be free for us by anyone on the Web? The Virtues of Openness examines the complex history of the concept of the open society before beginning a systematic investigation of openness in relation to the book, the "open text" and the written word. These changes are discussed in relation to the development of new open spaces of scholarship with their impact upon open journal systems, open peer review, open science, and the open global digital economy. The Virtues of Openness argues that openness suggests political transparency and the norms of open inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself as both the basis of the logic of inquiry and the dissemination of its results.

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The Medical Library Association's Master Guide to Authoritative Information Resources in the Health Sciences

In a field where resources must be accurate, dependable, and up to date to be useful, the task of developing or maintaining a collection can be stressful--and expensive. The Medical Library Association's Master Guide to Authoritative Information Resources in Health Sciences will make the process infinitely easier and more efficient. Under the guidance of expert contributors, the editors have compiled the best titles in an impressive range of disciplines and specialties in the health sciences literature, making their selections on the basis of quality, value, and professional importance. The guide: * Encompasses 35 specialties, plus additional sub-specialties, basic sciences, and emerging disciplines * Provides over 1,600 authoritative recommendations * Covers both the monographic and serial literature, in print and also in digital and online formats, including audiovisual resources As many as twenty of the top titles in each discipline are arranged by the G01 Biological Sciences and G02 Health Occupations tree schedules of the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings. Each entry contains full bibliographic information, followed by an annotation describing the scope and coverage of the work, any significant features, and intended audience. The editors also indicate whether the work is appropriate for a hospital collection, a well-rounded academic collection, specialized collections, and/or for a core consumer collection. Intended for both experienced practitioners and those new to the field, this unique guide will be an indispensable tool for librarians who must differentiate among the many choices of medical resources.

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Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media

This book serves as a convenient entry point for researchers, practitioners, and students to understand the problems and challenges, learn state-of-the-art solutions for their specific needs, and quickly identify new research problems in their domains. The contributors to this volume describe the recent advancements in three related parts: (1) user engagements in the dissemination of information disorder; (2) techniques on detecting and mitigating disinformation; and (3) trending issues such as ethics, blockchain, clickbaits, etc. This edited volume will appeal to students, researchers, and professionals working on disinformation, misinformation and fake news in social media from a unique lens.

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Beyond Fake News

The world is swimming in misinformation. Conflicting messages bombard us every day with news on everything from politics and world events to investments and alternative health. The daily paper, nightly news, websites, and social media each compete for our attention and each often insist on a different version of the facts. Inevitably, we have questions: Who is telling the truth? How would we know? How did we get here? What can we do?　 Beyond Fake News answers these and other queries. It offers a technological and market-based explanation for how our informational environment became so polluted. It shows how purveyors of news often have incentives to mislead us, and how consumers of information often have incentives to be misled. And it chronicles how, as technology improves and the regulatory burdens drop, our information-scape becomes ever more littered with misinformation. Beyond Fake News argues that even when we really want the truth, our minds are built in such a way so as to be incapable of grasping many facts, and blind spots mar our view of the world. But we can do better, both as individuals and as a society. As individuals, we can improve the accuracy of our understanding of the world by knowing who to trust and recognizing our limitations. And as a society, we can take important steps to reduce the quantity and effects of misinformation.

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Detecting Fake News on Social Media

In the past decade, social media has become increasingly popular for news consumption due to its easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. However, social media also enables the wide propagation of "fake news," i.e., news with intentionally false information. Fake news on social media can have significant negative societal effects. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research area that is attracting tremendous attention. This book, from a data mining perspective, introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of fake news across disciplines, reviews representative fake news detection methods in a principled way, and illustrates challenging issues of fake news detection on social media. In particular, we discussed the value of news content and social context, and important extensions to handle early detection, weakly-supervised detection, and explainable detection. The concepts, algorithms, and methods described in this lecture can help harness the power of social media to build effective and intelligent fake news detection systems. This book is an accessible introduction to the study of detecting fake news on social media. It is an essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners to understand, manage, and excel in this area. This book is supported by additional materials, including lecture slides, the complete set of figures, key references, datasets, tools used in this book, and the source code of representative algorithms.

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Fake News: Falsehood, Fabrication and Fantasy in Journalism

Fake News: Falsehood, fabrication and fantasy in journalism examines the causes and consequences of the ¿fake news¿ phenomenon now sweeping the world¿s media and political debates. Drawing on three decades of research and writing on journalism and news media, leading scholar Brian McNair engages with the fake news phenomenon in accessible, insightful language designed to bring clarity and context to a complex and fast-moving debate. McNair presents fake news not as a cultural issue in isolation but rather as arising from, and contributing to, significant political and social trends in twenty-first century societies. Chapters identify the factors which have laid the groundwork for fake news¿ explosive appearance at this moment in our globalised public sphere. These include the rise of relativism and the crisis of objectivity, the role of digital media platforms in the production and consumption of news, and the growing drive to produce online content which attracts users and generates revenue. The book also considers the decline of trust in journalism, and the how the traditional left critique of ¿dominant ideology¿ and ¿ruling elites¿ in media has been appropriated by the alt-right, nationalists and populists all over the world. This book rejects the left-right division in discussion of what is and is not ¿fake news¿. Rather, it aims to provide students, teachers, journalists and general readers with the tools necessary to navigate the digital journalism landscape in the era of President Donald Trump, and to filter out the ¿fact¿ from the ¿fake¿ in their news.

All the Checklists!

There are a large variety of checklist approaches to evaluation. These are just a few, and while they aren't a bad place to start, no checklist alone is a complete and deep level of investigation of the authority and credibility of a source of information.

Check out the Evaluation and Critical Evaluation pages for more information.

News Literacy Project

Level up your news literacy through the resources and programs provided by this nonpartisan national education nonprofit.

Other Guides to Check Out

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