How to Research on the Internet Era and Survive to Tell the Tale

After reading the last post you may be wondering "Okay, but then how do I know what I should believe? How do I know if my current perspective of the world is biased and in which ways?" Well, the answer is simple: critical thinking!

Fortunately for us, we live in an era where information is much more accessible to the average person. You don't need to be a wigged white man with a family tree that reaches back to William the Conqueror. This is not to say that privilege no longer exists, but we have ways of navigating the gatekeeping of information by the elite thanks to open-access journals and the divulgation of researchers through the internet. 

Unfortunately for us, all that glitters is not gold. The Internet being accessible implies that everyone and anyone can share information, no matter how balloony their ideas are. This means that somehow, we need to filter this information because there's no way that we can read everything that is out there right? But in order to do this, we need to have some sort of system to 1) find out which sources are trustworthy and which come from a person with a tin foil hat and 2) keep ourselves updated with the endless stream of consciousness that is the news feeds.

Let's tackle number 1 first. A general rule of thumb is to trust scientific journals. This is not to say that these don't have their biases —after all, we all do— but at the very least articles have to undergo a peer review process before they get published. So that means someone else is already doing part of the filtering for you.

Now, number 2 is a bit trickier. Ironically, the very same source of this constant flow of information offers as some help in filtering it —like one of those cooking robots that clean themselves! The Internet has a bunch of resources that help us poor researchers filter information and be up to date with the new hits of scientific journalism. Let us see some of these tools!

Feedly.com allows you to track scientific journals and websites of your interest and creates a feed that you can check periodically so that you can find all the new articles that may concern your research without having to jump on a wild goose chase on the Internet. You can also classify the kind of information you get into folders. Down here you can see that I have one folder for general news and another one for scientific journals.  

Now let's move on to another tool!

You can think of Diigo.com as a sort of website-gathering/note-taking application. It comes in quite handy when you're on the internet and you think "ah, this information could really go on a future article but I can really devote much time to it now" because it has a Google Chrome extension that allows you to a) save websites under different tags and descriptions and b) take notes on the website itself as well as on PDFs you can upload. Down here you can see the library I made with some resources.

Of course you can also group the items in your library as well as some other materials in different Outliners. This will allow you to create documents where you can gather your resources in a sort of mental map and take up notes for whatever you need to. Here you have a quick Outliner I made in a jiffy:

As you can see, there are plenty of resources out there that can make your research much easier. You can even combine them: for instance, you can use Feedly to be updated on the latest news and Diigo to gather the most interesting of these and take notes on your thoughts, or even link them to other pieces of information! In this way, you can develop your critical thinking skills by exposing yourself to different kinds of information without drowning in a sea of articles.