In his book Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers, Michael Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington, uses this metaphor for following a piece of information to its source. It's especially useful for our study of World Without Fish.
Mark Kurlansky offers a lot of interesting and often concerning information in this book. Sometimes he provides hints to where he found the information. In order to verify his claims or check the source, we need to start by going upstream to find the original. As Prof. Caulfield says, this is a journey through time and space!
Let's look at an example. On page xxiii of World Without Fish, we find this quotation:
There is a clue here that Kurlansky has found this information from another source that we should be able to find, too.
"A recent report by scientists..."
In a perfect world, Mark Kurlansky would have given us a citation to this "recent report" to make it easier for us to go upstream. (This is one reason why you are required to cite your sources!) If we are good information detectives, we should be able to find this "recent report" ourselves, and compare its findings to the author's claims.
We can start by listing keywords or ideas found in the quote above, and then searching for science news articles that reported on this. We don't have a publication date for this report, so we'll have to go with "recent."
"commercial fish species" -- Tip: putting quotation marks around a phrase tells a search engine to find the words together in this order
2048
biodiversity -- a synonym for "diversity in the ocean"
Presents reference information and topic guides in all areas of science, along with related news, magazine, and scholarly journal articles.
If we search the Science in Context database for:
["commercial fish species" AND 2048]
this is the first result:
"Back From the Brink." New York Times, 6 Aug. 2009, p. A28(L). Gale In Context: Science, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A205075442/SCIC?u=balt40277&sid=bookmark-SCIC&xid=2f891402. Accessed 25 Mar. 2024.
This article from the New York Times starts like this: "When last this page quoted Boris Worm, a marine ecologist in Canada, in 2006, he was conjuring a frightening vision of a world without seafood. Overfishing, pollution and other depredations, he said, could obliterate almost all the ocean's commercial fish species by 2048."
Aha! This seems to be talking about the same report that Kurlansky mentions. And, now we have a date and an author - Boris Worm, 2006. The article also includes the term "fisheries". We can add these new pieces of information to the search terms we already had to try to find Dr. Worm's original article.
From the publisher: ProQuest Research Library provides one-stop access to thousands of full-text periodicals from one of the broadest, most inclusive general reference databases ProQuest has to offer. Search from a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, professional and trade publications, and magazines covering over 150 subjects and topics.
To try to find Dr. Boris Worm's report, we'll switch to a database that has more scientific journals. In ProQuest Research Library, we'll do a search with our new terms like this:
[Worm AND 2048 AND fisheries]
This is the first result:
Branch, Trevor A. "Citation Patterns of a Controversial and High-Impact Paper: Worm Et Al. (2006) “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services”." PLoS One, vol. 8, no. 2, 2013. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/citation-patterns-controversial-high-impact-paper/docview/1330882485/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0056723.
This is not Dr. Worm's paper, but, it gives us an article title and a journal title! The article we're looking for is entitled “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services” and it was published in 2006 in the journal Science. That is enough information for us to find the article! And, if we look under "Suggested sources" in ProQuest, we see the citation:
Worm, Boris, et al. "Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services." Science, vol. 314, no. 5800, 2006, pp. 787-790. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/impacts-biodiversity-loss-on-ocean-ecosystem/docview/213615561/se-2.
However, ProQuest only gives us a citation, not the whole paper. Let's take the citation over to another search engine, Google Scholar:
Now we can search for the article title, "Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services".
The top result is our article!
Now we can skim this article for ourselves. However, on this upstream journey we might have noticed that Dr. Worm's paper has been called controversial. Why? Did Mark Kurlansky indicate that this paper is controversial in World Without Fish, which was published in 2011? Why or why not? Is 2006 still "recent"? What have more recent reports said?
We might have also noticed some other articles related to this topic. We can go back and investigate those further, and ask ourselves whether Mark Kurlansky has given us the full picture of these findings. What other questions should we ask?