Education and science: checking a source before you rely on it

This is the category where getting it wrong has the highest cost, and where the surface quality of a site tells you least about its reliability. A clean, confident, well-designed page can be entirely wrong, and a plain university department page with a 1990s layout can be the best source available.

The useful checks are unglamorous. Does the page name its author and their institution? Does it cite primary research rather than news coverage of research? Is there a date, and has the page been revised since? For anything medical, legal or safety-related, does it say when it was last reviewed and by whom?

Be particularly careful with the gap between a study and a headline about a study. The overwhelming majority of confident scientific claims circulating on the web are compressed from a single paper with a small sample, and the compression is where the error enters. A site that links to the paper is letting you check. A site that does not, is not.

The subcategories below cover astronomy, biology, physics, nanotechnology, research and colleges and universities. Institutional sites dominate for good reason in this category, and we list them alongside independent sites rather than in preference to them.