A complex solution

H.L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Information literacy keeps dragging itself down to easy-to-deliver, remedial fixes, probably because our librarian instructors are given so little time to interact with students.

I don’t know how to solve the limited instruction time issue, but there is a way forward: Teach students how to investigate their sources. The average undergraduate and even some graduate students are hard-pressed to tell the difference between a book chapter citation and one for an article. They assume that, if it has bibliographic notes, it’s scholarly. Most have no notion of preprints or shoddy levels of research.

Sure, we can warn them off Google Scholar, but that doesn’t mean they will listen. Google s web search engine and Google Scholar are now so entrenched as the world’s library catalogs, we will do far better teaching students how to navigate what they are using than banning everything except our somewhat pristine academic tools.

First, understand what you mean by a “scholarly article.” What makes it scholarly? How is it published? Is what you have a preprint (define), or are their signs on the journal website that this publication does not meet recognized academic standards (explain what these are)?

Second, possibly scholarly sources with novel conclusions are to be trusted less on first sight than those supporting more mainstream approaches to the research problem. “Wait a minute,” you may be thinking. “Isn’t the essence of scholarship to make advances? Favoring the mainstream smacks of old-boy networks and needless conservatism.” Sure it does. But leaping on the bandwagon of a new finding that has not been replicated is just as risky as rejecting that mainstream finding out of hand. The rule is simple: When you see novel conclusions, exercise a lot of caution.

Third, understand the social media, informal posting, blog, and opinion nature of modern scholarly communication. Scholars, because they can, float trial balloons, blog, discuss, and argue in public ways never seen before the creation of the web. Most of this is not intended to rise to the level of a scholarly publication, although it might one day. It is a new, creative way of generating ideas, and students need to learn how to distinguish this stuff from the results of peer review.

It’s all about the landscape

We live in an era that has more or less caught us by surprise. While many professors continue to affirm peer review and scholarly publication, they fail to help students come to terms with all the other publications created informally by scholars. They also fail to affirm the value of replication. This leave students with instructions that make little sense: Use only academic databases, no websites. Everything has to be peer-reviewed.

I have long argued that the scholarly landscape, as convoluted as it is, should be part of the curriculum and treated as being as significant as anything else we teach students. Without landscape instruction, scholarship is baffling, if not a grand example of chaos.

I fear for a public who, though educated, has no sense of how to navigate a new world where a preprint that says current vaccines can’t handle COVID variants, while a follow-up preprint says they can. Savvy, educated people should be able to walk among the seeming chaos and understand how much weight to give everything they encounter. It may not be an easy solution, but it’s the best one. Let’s figure out how to find the time and venues to teach the landscape to a level that our students can navigate it intelligently.