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COVID-19: Avoiding Misinformation and Conducting Credible Research

This guide intends to offer a bit of guidance on where to look for credible information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as how to avoid misinformation where possible.

Credible does not necessarily mean "Academic"!

This part of the research process can be tricky for some, as the researcher devotes some attention to non-academic sources. Peer-reviewed (i.e., scholarly sources) are wonderful publications to consult in the context of needing scientifically written, well-vetted information. All academic information should be credible, but not all credible information will be peer-reviewed. 

Even so, a credible publication will have undergone some vetting process. A magazine such as Time or Popular Mechanics will have an editorial process in place to approve the pieces their journalists submit. The quality of periodicals will often vary in part based on how rigorous that process is. Without  Peer-Review Process in place, as an academic publication would have, magazines can't be counted as a scholarly source. That does not mean such a publication is not credible, it simply means that it cannot fulfill the academic portion of the research process. 

Popular Source Recommendations: News, Periodicals, and More

  • Google News COVID-19 Updates
    • News feed through Google with intermittently updated statistics, as well as a feed pointing toward various newspapers/news websites.
  • ProQuest Global Newsstream
    • Global Newsstream enables users to search the most recent global news content – with archives that stretch back into the 1980s – from over 2,500 news sources including newspapers, newswires, news journals, television and radio transcripts, blogs, podcasts, and digital-only websites in full-text format. Global Newsstream provides one of the largest collections of news from the U.S., Canada, Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. Global Newsstream incorporates the U.S. Newsstream, Canadian Newsstream, and International Newsstream databases. All titles are cross searchable on the ProQuest platform.
  • ProQuest News & Newspapers
    • Contains full text for 7 different newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal & Constitution, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Times. ALso includes the Proquest Newsstand database and the Ethnic News Watch database.