A note on internet sources

Users of the internet have to be even more careful than readers of printed material in evaluating their sources. Why?

Publishers of books and journals (the name for more scholarly magazines) evaluate the stuff presented to them, and decline to publish much of it. Of course, they have many reasons for deciding what to publish, depending on the sort of publisher they are. All publishers have to be concerned with what will sell, but many are also concerned with the quality of what they publish--which will have an affect on sales, and in extreme cases helps to prevent lawsuits. Thus the publisher provides you with one check on the quality of what you read in print. The more scholarly the press, the safer the source: one basic rule of thumb is that university presses print relatively reliable books, because their reputations (and thus their sales, and the willingness of their university to continue supporting them) depend on a reputation for scholarly integrity. One should also attempt to distinguish between scholarly journals and popular magazines; scholarly journals send out submitted articles to scholars in the field, who, in a process known as "peer review," advise the journal on whether or not to publish the article. (Morris library has more on peer review here). Popular magazines may check facts, but don't routinely have scholars do so. Thus even good popular magazines (say, like Time) or even the best of newspapers (say, The New York Times) will often print erroneous information about scholarly topics).

When it comes to the web, anyone can publish anything they like. So you can't rely on a publisher to evaluate things for you. But there are still ways of telling whether or not a site is likely to present you with reliable information. Some larger sites (like the Perseus and Stoa sites) act rather like publishers might in vouching for the material posted onto them, and there are online journals that do peer review every bit as thorough as that in print journals. But most web sites are simply posted by a single author. Authors who are college professors ought to be relatively reliable. Sites posted by others may well contain much good stuff, but must be taken with a grain of salt.

Ultimately, of course, you must judge the quality of any source you read for yourself. Even fine publishers publish bad books, good web sites contain errors, and leading scholars say stupid things. And on many of the more important and interesting questions qualified scholars disagree. One essential part of gaining an education is learning to evaluate sources for the argumentation and use of evidence. Any hints about the quality of journals or publishers are just short cuts to help you weed out less likely sources.