How do you know that the information you are passing on to your readers is trustworthy?

With the internet so easily accessible and readily available to us all, it’s so easy to take it for granted. Gone are the days of the ceremonious dial-up process and pay-as-you-go system; now most of us are permanently connected to broadband or Wi-Fi by way of computer, tablet or smartphone. We can surf 24/7, whether we’re on the bus, at the beach, at home or in the lab, which is pretty incredible when you think about it – only we never do. It would seem that as technology has advanced, it’s become all too easy to forget the extent of power that this incredible tool keeps stored away in the cyber realms. With an abundance of knowledge and information that is so fingertip-ready for us, as researchers it’s important to remember that this data needs to be approached and handled with caution.

 

Research Data

If it’s medical journals or research reports you’re looking for, then no longer do you have to take a trip to the library to get your hands on the relevant information; the internet has its cyber shelves well and truly stocked for your convenience. What’s more, it’ll even helpfully sort out all those facts and figures for you, saving you the time and trouble of trawling through countless pages of dusty books and forgotten journal issues. Although the information on the internet is plentiful in supply, and you can access countless studies, collections of data and subsequent hypothesises at the convenient touch of a button, it has its drawbacks, nonetheless. For all of its convenience, nothing online is new.

Reliability

One of the internet’s greatest strengths is that it can be added to by anyone and everyone, meaning that information builds up at incredible rates. However, this is also one of its major weaknesses; how are you supposed to know where the information has come from and if you should trust it? So much of the data you’ll stumble across on the internet is unreliable and the sites you get it from entirely unpoliced. So, is what you’re looking at accurate, dependable data, or the third-hand results of a poorly executed study? There’s just no way of knowing sometimes. Google searches can be used to track flu data or even uncover drug side effects, but as soon as the word about such results gets out, more and more people are likely to perform the same searches out of curiosity. Likewise, using Twitter to track sentiment data can exaggerate problems as more people retweet, share, pass on the message and distort it. If you’re taking your research a step further than an online questionnaire you need a means of judging what data should be listened to.

So, when weighing up the pros and cons of using web-based research, we have a lot to put on the scales. On one hand, the internet offers readily available information that’s convenient to collect, easy to sort through and completely free, but on the other it’s unreliable, second-hand (at least) and has frequently already been quantified and analysed – so it’s nothing new. When deciding how to carry out your research, you need to have a think about what tips the balance for you – the pros or cons. If you find internet-based research con-heavy, then maybe it’s time to take a look at our automated research data capture solutions.