Trust in reading, citing and publishing

Selected findings from a recent project funded by the Sloan Foundation on the role that trust, or more specifically judgments of trustworthiness and authority, play in how academic researchers decide what to read, cite, and where to publish were presented at the 2014 NFAIS Annual Meeting. This project looked not only at the current role of trust in traditional sources such as journal articles and books, but also how academics perceive the role of trust has changed for them recently with a wider variety of choices for scholarly information. Full results from various parts of this international study are reported in [7] (focus groups), [16] (interviews) and [4] (international questionnaire). Additional analyses assessing geographical differences [3], citation determinations [14], and trustworthiness of open access [17] and social media [1] have also been reported. The project had two main goals, (1) to look at the current situation in how academics assign authority and trustworthiness to sources they read, cite, and publish in and (2) to see how behaviors and attitudes of academics may be changing. Research questions guiding the study included such things as: