How We Verify Our Sources

by Brian Dunning
February 11, 2025

If you're living in the 21st century, this is not the first time you've heard that misinformation abounds right now. But today I'm not talking about the kind of misinformation that might float around your table at the brewpub with your friends when discussing the events of the day; I'm talking about the kind that might steer you astray should you be writing an article or working on a book or some film project. When you assume the role of a communicator who is going to put words into some lasting form, rather than just blurting them out in a social gathering, you're taking on the obligation of an extra layer of responsibility to make sure that what you put down into words is as correct as possible.

So I thought I'd talk a bit about how I go about it, but then it occurred to me that if one guy's process is good, then six people's would be even better! So I went out to five colleagues, podcasters and science writers all, to have them share a bit of how they do it too. And to get us started, I'm going to take you back in time to one of the very first people I knew in this business, whom I met in 2008 when we shot The Skeptologists.

There's too much information to keep track of.

This is Dr. Kiki from This Week in Science. In the ideal situation, every person should verify information sources in order to truly understand the world. But, the world isn't an ideal place, and the idea that anyone aside from the motivated and properly-informed will successfully attempt the increasingly arduous task of questioning and verifying all sources of information they encounter is unrealistic.

The growing societal problem of information overwhelm is compounded by the rapid development of artificially generated information and content. The average person's capacity to verify the firehose is limited to non-existent given the daily pressures of modern life. Humans are predisposed to trust and believe information that confirms what we already believe and that supports our identities, while relying on trusted individuals to minimize the mental energy required to integrate any new information.

So long as people only have time to check their phone or do a quick skim of Wikipedia when they want to learn something, there's going to be no standards for the quality of information they get. It's the person who takes the time to find a good book, and then the time to read it, who is almost always going to get better information.

Here are some thoughts on how to do that:

Go to the primary source when you can...

I'm Kurly Tlapoyawa with the Tales From Aztlantis podcast, where we examine Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and we help combat the spread of disinformation about those topics. Due to the nature of our podcast, verifying our sources is extremely important. The main way that we do this is by relying upon primary source documents as much as possible. So, manuscripts, diaries, artifacts, codices, recordings etc. that were created by the people who were actually there — individuals who have direct knowledge of what we are investigating. And of course, the more primary source documents we can refer to the better, since the biases and experiences of the authors may offer contradictory accounts and provide for more context. So when you are utilizing secondary sources like journal articles or books, always check the citations and references, and then verify that the authors are using those citations accurately and honestly. On more than one occasion I have double-checked an author's citation only to find out that they were misrepresenting the primary source that they were citing.

I have found this exact same thing too. When I did episode #118 on the Bell Witch, the main book that everyone uses as their main source was written by a guy named Ingram who claimed that he got everything from a diary given to him by one of the people involved in the original incident. That diary would be the primary source Kurly is talking about. But it turns out no such diary ever existed — Ingram made it up, and made up most of the story, to sell a book.

...but you'll usually end up going with a secondary source.

I'm Ben Radford, Deputy Editor for Skeptical Inquirer science magazine, co-host of Squaring the Strange podcast, and a Research Fellow with the Center for Inquiry. Verifying sources is crucial to my work and books for several reasons — chief among them, I want to be right! Not just for the sake of being right (no one likes to be wrong) but because it means that you are a credible source of information and knowledge; it's what's called due diligence. If a writer or researcher can't be bothered to verify their sources, you have no reason to assume the accuracy of anything they write or say. Doing so is no guarantee of truth, of course, since any source can be wrong. But it does greatly improve the chances that the research will be accurate because primary sources are often the most reliable. Anytime a writer tells you, or summarizes, what another source did, said, or wrote, there are many opportunities for misunderstandings, misinterpretations, biases (intentional or unconscious), and other influences. The best way to avoid these and demonstrate the quality of your research is to verify your sources whenever possible and practical. Don't assume; verify!

It's true — so many authors of second-tier mass-market paperbacks simply summarize or restate chapters written by previous authors. The book consisting of original research is increasingly rare. The copycat authors become like a game of telephone; each time the story gets republished it becomes less accurate.

Learning about your source can be hard.

I'm Celestia Ward, co-host of Squaring the Strange. My background includes a bachelor's in writing and a decade editing at a university press, where I learned my way around a references section long before Wikipedia existed. Since technology has "democratized" publishing, it's vital that researchers learn how to sift worthwhile sources from the sea of misinformation at our fingertips. Ask: Is the author an established authority in their field? (And are they writing about something in their field?) Do they work at a credible institution? Does the material contain many typos or strange turns of phrase, indicating it's not been edited or reviewed? Is it in an established journal or platform? Misinformation often tries to dress up as legitimate by referencing a long list of sources, but when you click on these do you find biased, self-published junk — or simply more work by this same (unknown) author? Primary sources are the gold standard, but you will also have to read the work of others, and keeping these things in mind will help guide your search.

I'm reminded of a topic we touched on in episode #966, a recent Student Questions episode, where someone asked about a technique called brain fingerprinting, reading an EEG and studying the person's response to a particular stimulus to determine whether it was significant to them. The leading authority in this field — going by number of publications — is a guy named Larry Farwell. So you might conclude that he's the guy; anything he writes is going to be the best on the topic. But it turns out almost all the publications on brain fingerprinting are by him; and when you look at one of his papers, almost all of his citations are of his own work. It takes going out to find the rare paper written by anybody else to find that brain fingerprinting has little or no scientific support outside of Larry Farwell's mind.

Take later retellings of events with a grain of salt.

This is Richard Saunders from the Australian Skeptics and The Skeptic Zone podcast. Many years ago I picked up an invaluable lesson from listening to Skeptoid, the episode on the Westall UFO incident of 1966 here in Australia. Brian Dunning mentioned checking to see what the newspapers at the time of an event reported as he found that later reports over the years built on and embellished, sometimes into fantasy, the originally reported events. Since then, when researching an event, I have always gone back to whatever I can find that was reported at the time, the original sources you might say. Newspapers on microfilm in libraries or, more recently, available online from scans, can offer a good place to start. But we must keep in mind that while the reporting at the time of an event may not be completely accurate, it is vital to use these first reports to help build up a better understanding of what may have occurred. It may also give you the opportunity to cross match reports of the same event in different newspapers or even news (radio / TV) reports. This can help to verify. Our recent history is largely archived and more and more it is being made available. It's calling to you over the decades and centuries. It is still of great use and wants to be read.

My favorite example of this happening was the Rendlesham Forest UFO case, told in episode #135. Today it gets retold all the time on the streaming network UFO programs, and the story today is completely unrecognizable. When you go back to the original reports from the day it happened, the Air Force reports, the police reports, and the newspaper reports said very little and concluded that there was nothing of interest. But then, decades later, a few guys who played bit parts originally have become celebrities because they've added and added to their stories, making up new events out of whole cloth, and completely contradicting everything they said at the time.

Bottom line here is that if you want to learn about something that happened in 1980, read what was published in 1980. Don't trust that a pseudo-documentary made 45 years later is going to stick to those original, true-but-more-boring reports.

Beware of the Evil Ones.

Dr. Kiki continues:

Sources across the board are manipulating people with emotion to gain trust for their various goals. One formidable tool is misinformation, which can be based on honest misunderstandings or misstating of quotes or evidence, but can be used to seed and frame narratives. Alternatively, disinformation uses active lies and propaganda to sway belief. Regardless of the mechanism, how many people know the difference or care? I and others who produce factual content work very hard to do the verification so that others don't have to work so hard themselves. But, people need to trust us before they will listen.

The corruption of the media ecosystem by biased actors and profit-oriented technology infrastructure is going to make it more and more difficult to truly verify any information. And while increasing awareness of and training in information verification is necessary, it is not sufficient to address the scope of the problem. The solution depends on long-term strategy and investment in aligning educational curricula with skills that reinforce consideration and validation of knowledge and the methods used to produce it.

And that's really the cherry on top of this problem. Lazy and inaccurate information is one thing; but deliberate disinformation takes it to a new level. This is the easiest to spot, but only for those who take the real time and trouble to do so, and who have enough experience to know what to look for. For the average person for whom a glance at their phone is the way they get most of their information, they are the ones almost certain to be deceived into adopting a false narrative that Dr. Kiki is talking about. Don't let that be you.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning