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INFOLIT LAND
Explaining the Intricacies of Scholarly Publications in a Digital World
by William Badke
One of my favorite icebreakers with students in one-shots and courses is this: “Do you know the difference between an article and a journal?” The answers vary: “A journal is more personal, but an article is more academic”; “A journal is smaller, but an article is bigger” (or vice versa); or just awkward silence. Often, more than 80% have no idea. Even graduate students struggle with the question.
Information professionals are now caught between a rapidly evolving information landscape and the traditional patterns of academic literature. Take the typical academic database that lists search results as if they were Google results yet demands that we read them in a traditional academic citation format, including volumes and issues. This is baffling to our students in an era in which scholars and libraries no longer receive paper journals in physical mailboxes. A volume is called a “volume,” and it has “issues” only because libraries traditionally would bind a year’s issues in a real, physical hardcover volume that was placed on a shelf. Rarely is this the case today.
I could try to wax eloquent on academia’s need to transform its journal environment so that it can make sense to the average student, but there is more nuance to explore. The broader issue is that an analog system (journal, issue) has been overwhelmed by digital advances. A journal volume number in a world of tweets and truthiness (it’s true if it seems true) illustrates the reality that our landscape has changed profoundly, leaving old patterns as anachronisms. This disconnect between traditional scholarly publishing and current realities of where information occurs has a profound effect on information literacy.
The evolution of the landscape
The breadth of the information landscape is widening dramatically as more and more ways exist to generate text (humanly or artificially) in a variety of genres. This, of course, is wonderful. I can query Google for virtually anything, or craft an AI prompt, and get abundant information. Burgeoning out from the olden days of books, articles, and unpublished print materials is an amazing and complex world of everything all at once, a place where we can feast at the information buffet and never consume even a fraction of what is available.
We could argue that the analog system has long served as a means to signal academic quality to the world, but if it no longer makes sense to its younger users, it becomes a strange relic. “Why do I have to use only academic stuff? Why do I have to learn citation format? Google has always worked perfectly well for me.” Increasingly, academia is becoming another country with a foreign language that many of our students don’t understand or want to learn.
Suppose, then, we left our students to Google and helped them develop skills outside of our world of journals and articles so they can discern what information is credible. Here are some approaches already taken:
- “Be really careful about what you read online. Do the research.” This mantra is ridiculous. Sorry, but it has no value at all. How will the reader “be careful”? What kind of research can the reader do? And how credible would that research be? Unskilled searchers generally lack
the skills to investigate with certainty the claims in information they find, especially if it comes from a non-academic website.
- “Go with your gut. You’re an intelligent person, and your Spidey-senses are good enough to tell you when you are being lied to.” Same problem. Our gut lives on a diet of confirmation bias, so we are more likely to believe what we already believe and reject anything that contradicts our gut. This is another example of limited skill level standing in the way of good gatekeeping.
- “Triangulate. Check the information against two other sources. If they agree, you’re good.” In principle, this should be helpful, but so many of us live in silos. Two other social media posts in the same thread may well provide “confirmation” that has no value.
Alternatively, we could dig in our heels. Tell our students something like this: “In our house, you need to abandon Google for the most part. Only read academic stuff.” Lots of luck, though, convincing students to live only in the academic literature environment. We all know that while the academic world is safer when it comes to reliability because it is based on sound rules of evidence, most students, and people in general, live in a much broader world. And as technology evolves, even Google may become obsolete as generative AI (gen AI) promises answers, not lists.
Teaching the landscape
I’m constantly surprised, even in final assignments for my credit research courses, that I’m asked, “Can I add some websites to my reference list?” The question has complexities to it. I’m not against websites in principle. There are times when a good website may be key to answering a research problem. The challenge is that these students seem to be straining against the restrictions I’ve placed on them in demanding use of academic databases for the most part. Their question is more along the lines of, “When can I go back to what I’m familiar with and add a few websites?”
I guess I should let them have their websites, except that unless they truly understand the information landscape, their judgment will be impaired. Very rarely do students, in evaluating the quality of any piece of information, consider the qualifications of the author. Considering author qualifications should be paramount. But in 30-plus years of online experience in working with students, I have found that they first judge the perceived quality of the information itself without even considering who wrote it.
Whatever we teach our students, it is crucial to help them grasp the nature and authorial voices of the landscape in which they are working. Our students think they understand it, but the landscape has far more permutations and mysteries than they believe. Great website design or bold assertiveness does not necessarily signal anything about truth. A tweet or a Facebook post does not have the rigor of a carefully researched article (although a tweet may well prove to be a valuable primary source in research about the views of a prominent figure).
Some clear principles must be taught
Clarity about sources is teachable, with the desired outcome being the demystification of the overall information landscape. These three principles are key:
- There is a distinction between information that has had external gatekeeping (peer review, editorial oversight, publisher decisions) and information that was never vetted by anyone except the author. While gatekeeping may censor or deselect valuable knowledge, having no gatekeeping requires much more consideration about quality.
- Getting at the issue of “Who is the author? Who produced this?” becomes increasingly important. Your Cousin Fred can post seemingly wise words without having a clue
about the subject matter. But another cousin, holding an advanced degree, working for a think tank, and posting
on its website, is an actual authority. An impressively intelligent article can exhibit bias that diverges from reality. Forget the seeming brilliance of the content for a moment. Is this material coming from an author you could potentially trust? What happens if they trust Cousin Fred?
- There is a value in defaulting to expertise as exhibited in academic peer-reviewed resources. This does not mean that academia has all the answers, but that the process by which its material is created—scholarly authorship, peer review, publication in respected vehicles—gives a credibility level not always found in a social media post.
Ultimately, we all have to reckon with the whole landscape. There can be truth in tweets and thoughtful, valid insights in non-peer-reviewed websites. Students need to learn how to be strategic about their information sources, constantly questioning, constantly maintaining a good level of critical thinking about the material they read. This can only happen if we educate them about the landscape and teach them the skills of critical information literacy.
The shifting landscape
While traditional models of presentation predominate for academic literature, there are signs of change that may have ramifications for increased instability in the landscape. First, there is an increasing role for preprints not yet tied to any journal or peer reviewed. Google Scholar regularly includes millions of these in search results, muddying the perceptions of partially trained students about the definition of “academic.” Is peer review vitally important when the most common academic search engine disregards it as a criterion for inclusion?
Second, predatory, inferior journal publication is increasing, fueled by large article-processing charge (APC) revenue. Many of these are hard to identify, particularly when Google Scholar indexes them.
Third, I have a nightmare of a digital world buried in AI-generated “academic” stuff that has never had any human input or gatekeeping other than a series of prompts. You may think this is a crazy idea, but we once thought gen AI would never be anything special.
Fourth, to the plus side, some journals are morphing into something closer to what is experienced in a web presence. PLOS (plos.org/about), for example, is including links and slideshows in its articles. An increasing number of journals are sponsoring video abstracts (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10028770). I believe there is much more scope for using a continuing publication model in place of issue numbers and increasing the use of embedded video in articles themselves. A journal system based on the old pattern of getting a copy in your mail four times a year is not sensible in a digital age.
The current information landscape is clearly in transition and not always in a positive way. Who is helping students to navigate the signposts of quality when those signposts are buried in a lot of fog? This has clear ramifications for the ongoing worth of student research and ultimately of the work that some of those students will do as academics themselves after graduation.
There is a required knowledge piece here that is based on navigating an information world with skilled understanding. It’s not enough for students to limit search results to “scholarly/peer reviewed” and then harvest the results, dutifully citing them with the database citation app while never grasping what they are looking at. We have to teach the whole messy, morphing landscape that underlies academic literature, focusing on the process by which academic research turns into an academic product. Students need to understand what they are looking at, whether it is identified by traditional features—journal, date, volume, issue—or taking a newer form that recognizes digital-first publication. Without a grasp of all this, we leave students floundering in a mysterious environment that defies explanation and fosters a variety of misapprehensions.
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