by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
Last week, I looked at some poll findings showing that Americans want libraries to help them find reliable sources of information. It’s not hard to understand why. The task has gotten much harder.
I’m old enough to remember the world before the web.
As a kid, all the way into my undergraduate years, information was scarce. Finding it took work. You had to track down a phone book, an encyclopedia, a TV Guide. Or make a trip to the library, the record store, Blockbuster.
That was often inconvenient enough that we just went without knowing something – or argued about it. Indeed, the Guinness Book of World Records was created to help settle arguments in bars.
The web made it a whole lot easier to find information.
But in the process, it created an entirely new problem. Now there’s too much information. In 2023, the world created 120 zettabytes of data. A zettabyte is a sextillion bytes. That’s a 1 followed by 21 zeroes.
I can’t really grasp a number that big, so I looked up a few comparisons. A typical 2-hour movie shot in 4K is around 14 gigabytes; 120 zettabytes could hold 3.6 trillion of them. Or how about this: there are an estimated 7.5 sextillion grains of sand on earth. 120 sextillion is all the grains of sand on 16 earths.
It’s effectively an infinite amount of data, most of which we can access from a little computer we carry in our pockets.
Searching for information is worse than finding a needle in a haystack. It’s worse than finding a grain of sand on a beach. It’s like trying to find a specific handful of sand from among all the beaches on 16 different planets.
If you read this column regularly, you know that I used to work for FactCheck. org, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to reducing “the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” FactCheck’s writers spend most of their time there looking for credible evidence to either confirm or debunk claims being made by politicians.
I figured I’d pass along some of the rules-of-thumb we used for finding reliable information.
Peer-reviewed studies
These are things written by experts. But importantly, they are also reviewed by other experts. That peer review process helps to weed out errors and to ensure that the methods and arguments are rigorous and fully supported. The fastest way to find peer-reviewed sources is through Google Scholar (scholar.google.com).
Non-partisan government agencies
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congressional Research Service (CRS) and Government Accountability Office (GAO) are all formally nonpartisan. The directors of each are chosen by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress and serve terms that don’t coincide with elections. Information from any of these agencies was our gold standard for reliability. (Disclosure: I left FactCheck.org to take a job with the CBO).
Official government statistics
Several federal agencies are explicitly charged with gathering and reporting specific types of data. It includes things like the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Energy Information Administration and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. These days, most of the data these organizations collect is available through a central portal: Data.gov
Recognized experts
This one starts to get a little trickier. There are lots of people billing themselves as experts. Most of the time, we found experts by first looking at peer-reviewed studies, then contacting the authors of those studies for follow-up.
When we needed to go to experts directly, we started with people working at credible institutions—large research universities or think tanks that hire across the ideological spectrum. Places like the Brookings Institution, RAND Corporation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the National Bureau of Economic Research all fall into this category.
We would also talk to experts from organizations that had more explicit political leanings. Think tanks like the Center for American Progress (liberal leaning) and the Heritage Foundation (conservative leaning) employ smart people who approach various topics from a particular perspective. When consulting an expert from an organization with a particular leaning, it’s important to counterbalance with experts who lean in the opposite direction.
Professional fact checkers
This is the easiest one. As my former FactCheck.org colleague, Lori Robertson, wrote back in 2008: “We know you’re busy, and some of this debunking takes time. But we get paid to do this kind of work.” FactCheck, Politifact, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker and Snopes have been around for a long time. There’s a good chance that they’ve already looked into whatever you’re researching. You can always just start there.
And if you don’t see your question, you can always ask. FactCheck has been running a feature called, appropriately enough, Ask FactCheck since 2007. If you crawl back far enough through the archives, you might recognize the author of the very first one.
