Author: William Badke

A lot of students come into university life with an information search tool right on their phones: Google. Google is an answer machine, a lifeline, the place to go. Sure, we have Twitter and Instagram, but when we need solid information, Google is our library.

That said, students who have trusted Google to meet their knowledge needs often get a rude shock when they start university. Suddenly, mere websites have become unacceptable for research projects. Instead, professors want scholarly/academic literature, which seems hard to find with Google. Instead of our favorite search tool, we are told to use complex databases through the library home page, and these new search engines lack all the simplicity and ease of Google.

Let me point out a misunderstanding here: Google never was all that good a search tool. The resources you find there are very mixed, from the work of a professor to a site on the same topic from weird Uncle Joe who knows nothing but shares everything. Mere quality control can be a nightmare.

Then there is the Google search engine itself. Essentially, what you search for is what you get. If you used the wrong keywords, your results may well be mostly trash. There is no easy way to nuance results or filter down millions of citations to a hundred or so well-targeted and high-quality resources.

Here’s a general principle: The simpler the search engine, the more unlikely it is that you’ll get consistently good results. The better academic search engines allow you to nuance your results using filters that enable you to separate out the academic/scholarly ones from the lower level ones, so that you can focus more directly on those results that are actually going to help you.

What makes scholarly literature scholarly? How can we distinguish it from the kinds of things professors don’t want to see? First, scholarly literature is written by scholars. The single most important thing you can do is check out the author of a book or article. Does that author have a level of higher education (usually a doctorate) and the kind of experience that enables her/his work to past the test of being a valid member of the community of scholars in the discipline?

Second, most scholarly literature has passed peer review, a process by which other scholars check out and ask revisions for any manuscript submitted to a publisher before it can be published. Scholarly literature has to be properly vetted.

How can we find it? Use the library’s academic databases. They are not nearly as hard to learn as you might think, and there are lots of tutorials to guide you. As you search, filter your results to find academic work (usually through links to scholarly material on the left of your results). When in doubt, ask your professor or get in touch with a librarian. We can guide you.

Some links:
A guide to the library OneSearch system: http://libguides.twu.ca/LibraryOneSearch
Library tutorials: http://libguides.twu.ca/library_research/home

We live in an often bewildering information environment, where we struggle with what to trust and what to reject. Not only are there multiple voices, but a percentage of those voices seem actively determined to deceive us. Conspiracies abound, and there seem to be a lot of dumb notions out there about any topic under the sun.

It would be brilliant to have some simple tool, a garbage meter, that could filter out the evil and the stupid from genuinely valuable information. No such tool exists, though we do have something close to it: Expertise. We’ve all seen expertise. When you go to a doctor or a dentist or a car mechanic or your favorite professor, you are experiencing expertise.

So, what is it? Merely to say that experts know more than the rest of us is to miss the point. Certainly, expertise demands knowledge, but just as importantly, it demands a profound skill based on experience. The Hebrew language has a word for it: בִּינָה (Chokhmah), which has the basic meaning, “To have a skill.” The word was used for artisans, like metal workers, who not only knew their materials, but could shape those materials into works of beauty. Expertise is the ability to transform knowledge into art, into profoundly wise application.

Experts are everywhere. We need them and we tend to trust them. Thus, information provided to us by experts has a much greater potential to be trustworthy than information provided by non-experts. The power of expertise, however, is not absolute. Experts can be biased or deceptive. Non-experts sometimes come up with better answers than experts.

That is why we need a second principle: Authority. Authority speaks of the degree to which we trust a piece of information, whether produced by an expert or not. Authority resides in us, the receivers of information. We are responsible to evaluate what we receive. The best tool for evaluation is probably the qualifications of the author (expertise), but we must also judge for bias and even for deception. If we do a good job of this, we come up with an accurate judgment of information’s authority.

We might not have a garbage meter available to us, but it is still possible to rely on expertise and to use solid judgment to measure authority.

For more reading:
William Badke, “Expertise and Authority in an Age of Crowdsourcing,” in Not Just Where to Click: Teaching Students How to Think about Information. Ed. Troy Swanson; Heather Jagman, 191-215. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2015. http://williambadke.com/BadkeExpertiseAuthority.pdf