Digital Information Credibility: Towards a Set of Guidelines for Quality Assessment of Grey Literature in Multivocal Literature Review

Abstract

Credibility, in general, can be interpreted as a sense of trust in someone. The credibility of information remarkably influences the public’s willingness to do or not to do some things. In this research study, the credibility of digital news stories can be interpreted as the sense of confidence a person has in a source of available information that affects their behavior. Humans spread less credible information instead of more credible information very quickly because humans take an interest in fear, disgust, and surprise. Less credible news may affect individuals as well as economies. Therefore, there is a dire need in the current digital era to find out what affects the credibility of digital news stories. This study aims to review the published literature and the grey literature to determine the factors affecting digital news credibility and the factors that build credibility in digital news stories. In this paper, we have developed a multivocal literature review protocol to assess the credibility of digital news stories. The multivocal literature review is an advanced version of the systematic literature review that searches for grey literature in addition to the published literature. The expected outcomes after implementing our protocol will be a list of credibility factors and their practices that can play a vital role in ensuring the credibility of digital news stories. Based on this protocol, we formulated guidelines for the quality assessment of grey literature. The future direction of this research is to analyze the factors through multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM), i.e., analytical hierarchical process.

Towards Fake News Detection: A Multivocal Literature Review of Credibility Factors in Online News Stories and Analysis Using Analytical Hierarchical Process

“…MLRs are being increasingly utilized in the fields of computer science and software engineering to identify credibility factors in digital news stories [44][45][46]. The process of conducting an MLR follows guidelines proposed by Abrar et al [47] and is depicted in Figure 1. By including both formal and informal sources, MLRs provide a more comprehensive understanding of a topic compared to traditional systematic literature reviews, which only consider formally published research.…”

“…This method was chosen because a significant amount of information related to the research topic is available in both the formal and grey literature, including technical reports, blogs, and standards that are not typically published in academic sources. Our MLR process was established by following the guidelines put forth by Abrar et al [47], illustrated in Figures 1 and 2. Although it closely resembles the conventional SM and SLR processes, it sets itself apart by accommodating and managing grey data.…”