Credibility: A multidisciplinary framework

Introduction This chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the concept of credibility and its areas of application relevant to information science and technology, encompassing several disciplinary approaches. An information seeker's environment—the Internet, television, newspapers, schools, libraries, bookstores, and social networks—abounds with information resources that need to be evaluated for both their usefulness and their likely level of accuracy. As people gain access to a wider variety of information resources, they face greater uncertainty regarding who and what can be believed and, indeed, who or what is responsible for the information they encounter. Moreover, they have to develop new skills and strategies for determining how to assess the credibility of an information source. Historically, the credibility of information has been maintained largely by professional knowledge workers such as editors, reviewers, publishers, news reporters, and librarians. Today, quality control mechanisms are evolving in such a way that a vast amount of information accessed through a wide variety of systems and resources is out of date, incomplete, poorly organized, or simply inaccurate (Janes & Rosenfeld, 1996). Credibility has been examined across a number of fields ranging from communication, information science, psychology, marketing, and the management sciences to interdisciplinary efforts in human-computer interaction (HCI). Each field has examined the construct and its practical significance using fundamentally different approaches, goals, and presuppositions, all of which results in conflicting views of credibility and its effects. The notion of credibility has been discussed at least since Aristotle's examination of ethos and his observations of speakers' relative abilities to persuade listeners. Disciplinary approaches to investigating credibility systematically developed only in the last century, beginning within the field of communication. A landmark among these efforts was the work of Hovland and colleagues (Hovland, Jannis, & Kelley, 1953; Hovland & Weiss, 1951), who focused on the influence of various characteristics of a source on a recipient's message acceptance. This work was followed by decades of interest in the relative credibility of media involving comparisons between newspapers, radio, television, Communication researchers have tended to focus on sources and media, viewing credibility as a perceived characteristic. Within information science, the focus is on the evaluation of information, most typically instantiated in documents and statements. Here, credibility has been viewed largely as a criterion for relevance judgment, with researchers focusing on how information seekers assess a document's likely level of This brief account highlights an often implicit focus on varying objects …