The world’s most powerful industries have developed a number of major strategies in an attempt to maintain their power and ensure that the status quo is not disrupted. One of the most insidious of these is in addition to hijacking our political systems, they have hijacked the primary means of spreading news and other information.

This is particularly evident in mainstream corporate media (“MSM”), but unfortunately this corruption has even filtered down into institutions that are traditionally supposed to be more trustworthy, such as academic institutions and journals.

So how do we know what or who to believe? Due to the extent of the corruption by powerful industry, this is not a simple answer; however, there are definitely some steps we can take to increase the likelihood that the information we gather is reasonably accurate:

Here is a list of some organizations and methods that allow you to bypass the research paywall in different ways:

• Science Hub:  This open access organization likely provides access to the largest range of academic research articles. Here is an article that gives a nice overview of how to use Science Hub.
• Library Genesis:  Another Open Access organization similar to Science Hub, but its focus is more on providing access to ebooks and popular science magazine articles and less so to academic journal articles. Here is an article that gives an overview of how to use Library Genesis.

*The links to the above sites may not work for long–due to the legally “grey” nature of such services, these organizations often need to change their domain names (typically just the extensions) to keep from getting shut down, and it’s difficult to say how long they will manage to remain in operation. Here is one website that keeps track of currently functioning domain names (including various “proxy” or “mirror” sites) that provide access to Science Hub and Library Genesis.

• Citationsy:  This is a relatively user friendly site that taps directly into Science Hub and Open Access Button, and they generally stay on top of domain changes for these organizations, so this can be a good website to use when you find that the domain names of these other websites (particularly Science Hub) have been changed.
• Open Access Button:  This is another option for accessing open access research articles; however, because they make a serious effort to avoid bending copyright laws, they are likely to have less articles available than what you would find at Science Hub.
• Google Scholar:  This is a specialized research-focused web browser provided by Google. You can gain free access to many research articles here.

*Note:  Most of these services will require that you first locate the url, PMID or doi# of the particular article that you want to find. So going back to the earlier step of tracking news articles, etc., to their “peer reviewed research” roots (discussed above), we can begin our detective work by plugging the names of the referenced research articles into services such as Google Scholar, PubMed or Crossref, which should then bring up the url, PMID or doi# (the latter always begins with “10,” not “http”) of that particular article; and then we can plug this figure into the open access services listed above. If you need further guidance, this article provides a good description of these steps.

Wikipedia is helpful, but is generally not considered a reliable source

Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at anytime, which has its pros and cons. This structure has allowed it to gather far more information than any normally staffed encyclopedia producer could ever achieve, and it provides a way for people to contribute to a very popular body of knowledge who would otherwise find it difficult to do so; but it also means that its pages are vulnerable to being manipulated by special interests. This is why academic institutions generally don’t allow Wikipedia to be used as a reference for research articles.

Wikipedia itself even acknowledges this reliability problem. So while Wikipedia can be a very helpful starting point when researching into a topic, and typically provides a helpful list of relevant references at the end of the page (though this list itself may be biased), make sure you dig deeper into the topic by tracking the information to its source, as discussed above.

Locate opposing information, and use the above strategies to compare its credibility

Gaining access to original peer reviewed research is only half the battle of gathering solid evidence and information. The other half of the battle (at least) involves recognizing and overcoming our own biases. There are nearly always multiple perspectives/opinions/conclusions based on any particular event or issue. If a particular event or issue is important to us, it’s definitely worth taking the time to understand alternative perspectives and striving to “put our feet into the shoes of others.”

It is up to each of us to develop the capacity to recognize our own biases

We all have our own biases, and our mind works in such a way that it naturally filters out and/or rejects information that’s contrary to our pre-existing beliefs. It’s a challenging but important skill to continually monitor our own biases and open our minds to new perspectives.

Identify ‘Converging Lines of Inquiry’

A key principle in conducting formal research is establishing and/or identifying converging lines of inquiry. Is the evidence from multiple sources leading to a similar conclusion? This principle is particularly important when we consider just how polarized and corrupt today’s information landscape is – it is very difficult to trust the credibility of any single source. However, when multiple sources with clearly different perspectives and biases converge upon a similar conclusion, this can add substantially to the credibility of that conclusion.

Identify when a source conveys information against its own interest

As discussed above, we all have our own biases. And it’s evident that certain sources will even go so far as to intentionally spread misinformation when doing so benefits their own special interests. However, even such dishonest sources still want to maintain a veneer of integrity and credibility. Therefore, when certain information that goes against their own interests becomes clearly evident, these sources will often be required to convey this information publicly, in order to maintain the veneer of integrity and credibility. Most of us can think of examples when certain industries or corporate-funded media were forced to take such face-saving measures. In summary, then, when we come across this kind of information – that which goes directly against the interests of the source – we may want to consider whether it deserves a few extra marks of credibility.