There is a huge number of documents published every year, presenting data, information, and knowledge (information from here on) taken from a great variety of sources, from the most rigorous in their accuracy and reliability to the unsupervised ones, that cover a wide spectrum of topics.
Nowadays, many documents can be readily located with the help of search engines developed for helping to gather the information contained there. Certainly, the convenience of doing this compared to seeking in physical libraries is amazing, however, the most important issue regardless of the way the information is consulted is the reliability of the available material. A starting point for reliability is assuming that to the best of their knowledge, the generators of the published material thought that it was correct as they expect to be believed; if they are wrong, then they are a source of misinformation. Fake information posted on purpose is a separate issue that requires other analyses.
The value of a search depends as much on the quality of the found material as on the intellectual background of the consultant people applying their criterion about the plausibility of their findings. The best scenario is that every search takes the consultants to true answers as they can interpret them correctly. Another possibility is that true information is not accepted by the consultants, then a question that might arise is whether the true information is not presented properly, or the consultants just did not believe it. The same picture can occur with misinformation, which could be rejected if the consultant does not find it sound. However, the worst case is its acceptance either because it is very well presented, or the consultant is unable to evaluate it. The possibility of spreading misinformation is high in this case because the outcome of the search becomes the input of a new one.
It looks like the responsibility of the acceptance and use of the information falls on the consultants’ side, addressing their intellectual background, which requires instruction and education that are often out of the reach of the source builders. However, the responsibility of those who provide information cannot be left out as they must care even more, especially if generating misinformation is easy because it can be based on beliefs held on misunderstanding, exaggeration, and oversimplification, among others. This role implies their double duty of being careful while they produce the material and when preventing the dissemination of potential misinformation. In the case of publications aimed to be the most updated and reliable sources, the authors of the papers are the producers of the material that must be true and presented in a language accessible to their audience. In the second duty, preventing the dissemination of misinformation, the authors are helped by the referees, who in the first instance act as if they were the consultants, applying their knowledge, scientific background, and intellectual abilities, to decide about the worthiness of a manuscript as a reliable source of information. They help the editor to decide regarding the publication of the proposed material by submitting their recommendation for approval of what is acceptable and rejecting what is not. Moreover, they provide criticism to the authors to enhance their acceptable material and to improve what could be acceptable after correction. In a peer-review system, the authors also act as reviewers of their referees, pondering their criticisms and performing the necessary amendments. Although cross-judging is a difficult task since they all face the same vulnerabilities while expressing their criticism, it reduces the opportunity of supplying misinformation, so that the consultants can be confident in the learning process rather than challenging their ability to evaluate plausibility in their findings.
The combination of the work author-referee is a key piece in favor of providing reliable information. However, being the authors the primary source of information, they have an intrinsic ethical compromise while writing their manuscripts to reduce possible spots of misinformation. There are several chances to produce misinformation while writing a document because that task involves other factors besides the subject to be presented. As an example, leaving aside the obvious writing skills of the authors to construct their documents clearly, misinformation could be produced using words and sentences oriented to emphasize the arguments on a discussion of evidence, such as those that claim novelty, enhancement, or some other special value of the reported material, as omitting limitations of the discussion. The potential of misinformation here depends on what the consultant takes, either the evidence or the claims. This is only an example of an opportunity for misinterpretation that in turn leads to misinformation.
The responsibility of the authors on the reliability of their proposed material has been stated as the value of the work of the referees in the objective of building trustworthy sources of information with the production of the authors. In the process, they help the authors to build their good reputation, comply with their objective, and prevent the spreading of misinformation. There are no shortcuts in this process, the first step is the clean generation of material, then learning about possible sources of misinformation and clarifying them, and finally distributing reliable information. If we skip any step in the somehow self-supervised process, then the potential of feeding misinformation and myths increases. However, that is not the only consequence, others are the waste of resources on repeating research for getting the right answers after correcting misinformation and debunking myths, and the undesirable consequences of the decisions made upon misinformation that looked plausible. Therefore, we must continue the pursuit of generating and providing reliable data, information, and knowledge.
Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Facultad deIngeniería Mecánica y Eléctrica, San Nicolás de los Garza NL, Mexico.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).