Teaching Undergraduates to Collate and Evaluate News Sources with Altmetrics

In the digital age of information, undergraduate students often have a difficult time identifying and differentiating among online sources, such as news articles, blog posts, and academic articles. Students generally find these sources online and often struggle to vet them for consistency, context, quality, and validity. In this chapter, we present a new purpose for altmetrics in which librarians teach undergraduates to use altmetrics as a tool to evaluate and differentiate between online mainstream and scholarly sources, which can lead to a deeper understanding of the research process and the engagement and discussion surrounding research as well as an increased ability to evaluate sources more critically. On a more advanced level, students will be able to analyze different levels of inaccuracy and misrepresentation of research from mainstream sources and more accurately identify highly sensationalized research topics from mainstream sources, seminal works of research, and deliberately misleading information and/or fake news.

Slides for the learning activity are available at https://sandbox.acrl.org/library-collection/using-altmetrics-evaluate-pseudoscience-news-media