Fighting Misinformation: Where Are We and Where to Go?

Fighting Misinformation: Where Are We and Where to Go?

연구 분야: Infrastructure

학회: International Conference on Information

This study reviews existing studies on misinformation. Our purposes are to understand the major research topics that have been investigated by researchers from a variety of disciplines, and to identify important areas for further exploration for library and information science scholars. We conducted automatic descriptive analysis and manual content analysis after selecting journal articles from 4 major databases. The automatic analysis of 5,586 journal articles demonstrated that misinformation has been an increasingly popular research area in recent 12 years, and scholars in more than 1,200 fields of study have published related articles in more than 2,400 journals. Topics explored include misinformation environments, impact of misinformation, users/victims, types of misinformation, misinformation detection & correction, and others; The content analysis of 151 articles published in library and information studies journals found that more than 40 different theories/models/frameworks have been applied to understand or fight misinformation. Furthermore, information scholars have suggested that the research of misinformation could be explored further in 5 categories, including further understanding misinformation, its spread, and impacts; misinformation detection and correction, Policy and education to fight misinformation, more case studies, and more theory and model development. This study provides a broad picture of misinformation research, which allows researchers and practitioners to better plan and develop their projects and strategies for fighting misinformation. It also provides evidence to information schools to enhance curriculum development for educating the next generation of information professionals.