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Discovery Seminar - What are Plants Good For? - Jacob - Fall 2025

A guide for students in Dr. Jacob's Fall 2025 Discovery Seminar at Oxford College.

Practice!

  Practice

Which one of these sites do you feel is a more reliable source for information on children's health? Why?

American Academy of Pediatrics American College of Pediatricians

What about when a group is name-checked in a news story?

  Practice

Can you trace the source of this claim? Is the claim true? Where can you find better coverage?

 

 

 

  Practice

 

Check this Tweet with SIFT! What steps would you take? What experts or other sources would you look to? What would you investigate first?

Image of a tweet about Girl Scout cookies found to contain heavy metals and pesticides

 

 

 

Suppose you found this article while searching for sources. Is it reliable? Why or why not?

A Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science

Infographic showing 12 elements of faulty scientific claims: Sensationalized headlines, Misinterpreted results, Conflicts of interest, Correlation & causation, Unsupported conclusions, Problems with sample size, Unrepresentative samples used, No control group used, No blind testing used, Selective reporting of data, Unreplicable results, Non-peer reviewed material. Shared under Creative Commons by Compound Interest 2015

Criteria for Evaluating Sources

  Evaluating Sources

Some of the questions you should ask when evaluating sources of information are:

  • Audience? Who will be reading this source?
  • Author? Who wrote this source?
  • Credentials? What are the credentials of the author? Can you tell if they are an expert on the subject? 
  • Are there sources or links to other information about the topic? Yes (If so, what kind?) or No.
  • Purpose? What is the purpose of this source?
  • Language? How easy or difficult to read or understand will most people find this source?
  • Publisher? Who published this source?
  • Source of information reliable? Would you trust this source? 
  • Scholarly/Popular? Is this source scholarly or popular?
  • Peer Review? Is this source peer-reviewed? How can you tell?