literature review on news websites

Although fake news creation and consumption are mutually related and can be changed to one another, our review indicates that a significant amount of research has primarily focused on news creation. To mitigate this research gap, we present a comprehensive survey of fake news research, conducted in the fields of computer and social sciences, through the lens of news creation and consumption with internal and external factors.

We collect 2,277 fake news-related literature searching six primary publishers (ACM, IEEE, arXiv, APA, ELSEVIER, and Wiley) from July to September 2020. These articles are screened according to specific inclusion criteria (see Fig 1). Eligible literature are categorized, and temporal trends of fake news research are examined.

As a way to acquire more comprehensive understandings of fake news and identify effective countermeasures, our review suggests (1) developing a computational model that considers the characteristics of news consumption environments leveraging insights from social science, (2) understanding the diversity of news consumers through mental models, and (3) increasing consumers’ awareness of the characteristics and impacts of fake news through the support of transparent information access and education.

We discuss the importance and direction of supporting one’s “digital media literacy” in various news generation and consumption environments through the convergence of computational and social science research.

Citation: Kim B, Xiong A, Lee D, Han K (2021) A systematic review on fake news research through the lens of news creation and consumption: Research efforts, challenges, and future directions. PLoS ONE 16(12): e0260080. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260080

Editor: Luigi Lavorgna, Universita degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, ITALY

Received: March 24, 2021; Accepted: November 2, 2021; Published: December 9, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Kim et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript.

Funding: This research was supported by the Institute of Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (2019-0-01584, 2020-0-01373).

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1 Introduction

The spread of fake news not only deceives the public, but also affects society, politics, the economy and culture. For instance, Buzzfeed ( https://www.buzzfeed.com/ ) compared and analyzed participation in 20 real news and 20 fake news articles (e.g., likes, comments, share activities) that spread the most on Facebook during the last three months of the 2016 US Presidential Election. According to the results, the participation rate of fake news (8.7 million) was higher than that of mainstream news (7.3 million), and 17 of the 20 fake news played an advantageous role in winning the election [ 1 ]. Pakistan’s ministry of Defense posted a tweet fiercely condemning Israel after coming to believe that Israel had threatened Pakistan with nuclear weapons, which was later found to be false [ 2 ]. Recently, the spread of the absurd rumor that COVID-19 propagates through 5G base stations in the UK caused many people to become upset and resulted in a base station being set on fire [ 3 ].

Such fake news phenomenon has been rapidly evolving with the emergence of social media [ 4 , 5 ]. Fake news can be quickly shared by friends, followers, or even strangers within only a few seconds. Repeating a series of these processes could lead the public to form the wrong collective intelligence [ 6 ]. This could further develop into diverse social problems (i.e., setting a base station on fire because of rumors). In addition, some people believe and propagate fake news due to their personal norms, regardless of the factuality of the content [ 7 ]. Research in social science has suggested that cognitive bias (e.g., confirmation bias, bandwagon effect, and choice-supportive bias) [ 8 ] is one of the most pivotal factors in making irrational decisions in terms of the both creation and consumption of fake news [ 9 , 10 ]. Cognitive bias greatly contributes to the formation and enhancement of the echo chamber [ 11 ], meaning that news consumers share and consume information only in the direction of strengthening their beliefs [ 12 ].

Research using computational techniques (e.g., machine or deep learning) has been actively conducted for the past decade to investigate the current state of fake news and detect it effectively [ 13 ]. In particular, research into text-based feature selection and the development of detection models has been very actively and extensively conducted [ 14 – 17 ]. Research has been also active in the collection of fake news datasets [ 18 , 19 ] and fact-checking methodologies for model development [ 20 – 22 ]. Recently, Deepfake, which can manipulate images or videos through deep learning technology, has been used to create fake news images or videos, significantly increasing social concerns [ 23 ], and a growing body of research is being conducted to find ways of mitigating such concerns [ 24 – 26 ]. In addition, some research on system development (i.e., a game to increase awareness of the negative aspects of fake news) has been conducted to educate the public to avoid and prevent them from the situation where they could fall into the echo chamber, misunderstandings, wrong decision-making, blind belief, and propagating fake news [ 27 – 29 ].

While the creation and consumption of fake news are clearly different behaviors, due to the characteristics of the online environment (e.g., information can be easily created, shared, and consumed by anyone at anytime from anywhere), the boundaries between fake news creators and consumers have started to become blurred. Depending on the situation, people can quickly change their roles from fake news consumers to creators, or vice versa (with or without their intention). Furthermore, news creation and consumption are the most fundamental aspects that form the relationship between news and people. However, a significant amount of fake news research has positioned in news creation while considerably less research focus has been placed in news consumption (see Figs 1 & 2 ). This suggests that we must consider fake news as a comprehensive aspect of news consumption and creation .

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260080.g001

The papers were published in IEEE, ACM, ELSEVIER, arXiv, Wiley, APA from 2010 to 2020 classified by publisher, main category, sub category, and evaluation method (left to right).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260080.g002

In this paper, we looked into fake news research through the lens of news creation and consumption ( Fig 3 ). Our survey results offer different yet salient insights on fake news research compared with other survey papers (e.g., [ 13 , 30 , 31 ]), which primarily focus on fake news creation. The main contributions of our survey are as follows:

We investigate trends in fake news research from 2010 to 2020 and confirm a need for applying a comprehensive perspective to fake news phenomenon.
We present fake news research through the lens of news creation and consumption with external and internal factors.
We examine key findings with a mental model approach, which highlights individuals’ differences in information understandings, expectations, or consumption.
We summarize our review and discuss complementary roles of computer and social sciences and potential future directions for fake news research.

We investigate fake news research trend (Section 2), and examine fake news creation and consumption through the lenses of external and internal factors. We also investigate research efforts to mitigate external factors of fake news creation and consumption: (a) indicates fake news creation (Section 3), and (b) indicates fake news consumption (Section 4). “Possible moves” indicates that news consumers “possibly” create/propagate fake news without being aware of any negative impact.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260080.g003

2 Fake news definition and trends

There is still no definition of fake news that can encompass false news and various types of disinformation (e.g., satire, fabricated content) and can reach a social consensus [ 30 ]. The definition continues to change over time and may vary depending on the research focus. Some research has defined fake news as false news based on the intention and factuality of the information [ 4 , 15 , 32 – 36 ]. For example, Allcott and Gentzkow [ 4 ] defined fake news as “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false and could mislead readers.” On the other hand, other studies have defined it as “a news article or message published and propagated through media, carrying false information regardless of the means and motives behind it” [ 13 , 37 – 43 ]. Given this definition, fake news refers to false information that causes an individual to be deceived or doubt the truth, and fake news can only be useful if it actually deceives or confuses consumers. Zhou and Zafarani [ 31 ] proposed a broad definition (“Fake news is false news.”) that encompasses false online content and a narrow definition (“Fake news is intentionally and verifiably false news published by a news outlet.”). The narrow definition is valid from the fake news creation perspective. However, given that fake news creators and consumers are now interchangeable (e.g., news consumers also play a role of gatekeeper for fake news propagation), it has become important to understand and investigate the fake news through consumption perspectives. Thus, in this paper, we use the broad definition of fake news.

Our research motivation for considering news creation and consumption in fake news research was based on the trend analysis. We collected 2,277 fake news-related literature using four keywords (i.e., fake news, false information, misinformation, rumor) to identify longitudinal trends of fake news research from 2010 to 2020. The data collection was conducted from July to September 2020. The criteria of data collection was whether any of these keywords exists in the title or abstract. To reflect diverse research backgrounds/domains, we considered six primary publishers (ACM, IEEE, arXiv, APA, ELSEVIER, and Wiley). The number of papers collected for each publisher is as follows: 852 IEEE (37%), 639 ACM (28%), 463 ELSEVIER (20%), 142 arXiv (7%), 141 Wiley (6%), 40 APA (2%). We excluded 59 papers that did not have the abstract and used 2,218 papers for the analysis. We then randomly chose 200 papers, and two coders conducted manual inspection and categorization. The inter-coder reliability was verified by the Cohen’s Kappa measurement. The scores for each main/sub-category were higher than 0.72 (min: 0.72, max: 0.95, avg: 0.85), indicating that the inter-coder reliability lies between “substantial” to “perfect” [ 44 ]. Through the coding procedure, we excluded non-English studies (n = 12) and reports on study protocol only (n = 6), and 182 papers were included in synthesis. The PRISMA flow chart depicts the number of articles identified, included, and excluded (see Fig 1 ).

The papers were categorized into two main categories: (1) creation (studies with efforts to detect fake news or mitigate spread of fake news) and (2) consumption (studies that reported the social impacts of fake news on individuals or societies and how to appropriately handle fake news). Each main category was then classified into sub-categories. Fig 4 shows the frequency of the entire literature by year and the overall trend of fake news research. It appears that the consumption perspective of fake news still has not received sufficient attention compared with the creation perspective ( Fig 4(a) ). Fake news studies have exploded since the 2016 US Presidential Election, and the trend of increase in fake news research continues. In the creation category, the majority of papers (135 out of 158; 85%) were related to the false information (e.g., fake news, rumor, clickbait, spam) detection model ( Fig 4(b) ). On the other hand, in the consumption category, much research pertains to data-driven fake news trend analysis (18 out of 42; 43%) or fake content consumption behavior (16 out of 42; 38%), including studies for media literacy education or echo chamber awareness ( Fig 4(c) ).

We collected 2,277 fake news related-papers and randomly chose and categorized 200 papers. Each marker indicates the number of fake news studies per type published in a given year. Fig 4(a) shows a research trend of news creation and consumption (main category). Fig 4(b) and 4(c) show a trend of the sub-categories of news creation and consumption. In Fig 4(b), “Miscellaneous” includes studies on stance/propaganda detection and a survey paper. In Fig 4(c), “Data-driven fake news trend analysis” mainly covers the studies reporting the influence of fake news that spread around specific political/social events (e.g., fake news in Presidential Election 2016, Rumor in Weibo after 2015 Tianjin explosions). “Conspiracy theory” refers to an unverified rumor that was passed on to the public.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260080.g004

3 Fake news creation

Fake news is no longer merely propaganda spread by inflammatory politicians; it is also made for financial benefit or personal enjoyment [ 45 ]. With the development of social media platforms people often create completely false information for reasons beyond satire. Further, there is a vicious cycle of this false information being abused by politicians and agitators.

Fake news creators are indiscriminately producing fake news while considering the behavioral and psychological characteristics of today’s news consumers [ 46 ]. For instance, the sleeper effect [ 47 ] refers to a phenomenon in which the persuasion effect increases over time, even though the pedigree of information shows low reliability. In other words, after a long period of time, memories of the pedigree become poor and only the content tends to be remembered regardless of the reliability of the pedigree. Through this process, less reliable information becomes more persuasive over time. Fake news creators have effectively created and propagated fake news by targeting the public’s preference for news consumption through peripheral processing routes [ 35 , 48 ].

Peripheral routes are based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) [ 49 ], one of the representative psychological theories that handles persuasive messages. According to the ELM, the path of persuasive message processing can be divided into the central and the peripheral routes depending on the level of involvement. On one hand, if the message recipient puts a great deal of cognitive effort into processing, the central path is chosen. On the other hand, if the process of the message is limited due to personal characteristics or distractions, the peripheral route is chosen. Through a peripheral route, a decision is made based on other secondary cues (e.g., speakers, comments) rather than the logic or strength of the argument.

Wang et al. [ 50 ] demonstrated that most of the links shared or mentioned in social media have never even been clicked. This implies that many people perceive and process information in only fragmentary way, such as via news headlines and the people sharing news, rather than considering the logical flow of news content.

In this section, we closely examined each of the external and internal factors affecting fake news creation, as well as the research efforts carried out to mitigate the negative results based on the fake news creation perspective.

3.1 External factors: Fake news creation facilitators

We identified two external factors that facilitate fake news creation and propagation: (1) the unification of news creation, consumption, and distribution, (2) the misuse of AI technology, and (3) the use of social media as a news platform (see Fig 5 ).

We identify two external factors—The unification of news and the misuse of AI technology—That facilitate fake news creation.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260080.g005

3.1.1 The unification of news creation, consumption, and distribution.

The public’s perception of news and the major media of news consumption has gradually changed. The public no longer passively consumes news exclusively through traditional news organizations with specific formats (e.g., the inverted pyramid style, verified sources) nor view those news simply as a medium for information acquisition. The public’s active news consumption behaviors began in earnest with the advent of citizen journalism by implementing journalistic behavior based on citizen participation [ 51 ] and became commonplace with the emergence of social media. As a result, the public began to prefer interactive media, in which new information could be acquired, their opinions can be offered, and they can discuss the news with other news consumers. This environment has motivated the public to make content about their beliefs and deliver the content to many people as “news.” For example, a recent police crackdown video posted in social media quickly spread around the world that influenced protesters and civic movements. Then, it was reported later by the mainstream media [ 52 ].

The boundaries between professional journalists and amateurs, as well as between news consumers and creators, are disappearing. This has led to a potential increase in deceptive communications, making news consumers suspicious and misinterpreted the reality. Online platforms (e.g., YouTube, Facebook) that allow users to freely produce and distribute content have been growing significantly. As a result, fake news content can be used to attract secondary income (e.g., multinational enterprises’ advertising fees), which contributes to accelerating fake news creation and propagation. An environment in which the public can only consume news that suits their preferences and personal cognitive biases has made it much easier for fake news creators to achieve their specific purposes (e.g., supporting a certain political party or a candidate they favor).

3.1.2 The misuse of AI technology.

The development of AI technology has made it easier to develop and utilize tools for creating fake news, and many studies have confirmed the impact of these technologies— (1) social bots, (2) trolls, and (3) fake media —on social networks and democracy over the past decade.

3.1.2.1 Social bots . Shao et al. [ 53 ] analyzed the pattern of fake news spread and confirmed that social bots play a significant role in fake news propagation and social bot-based automated accounts were largely affected by the initial stage of spreading fake news. In general, it is uneasy for the public to determine whether such accounts are people or bots. In addition, social bots are not illegal tools and many companies legally purchase them as a part of marketing, thus it is not easy to curb the use of social bots systematically.

3.1.2.2 Trolls . The term “trolls” refers to people who deliberately cause conflict or division by uploading inflammatory, provocative content or unrelated posts to online communities. They work with the aim of stimulating people’s feelings or beliefs and hindering mature discussions. For example, the Russian troll army has been active in social media to advance its political agenda and cause social turmoil in the US [ 54 ]. Zannettou et al. [ 55 ] confirmed how effectively the Russian troll army has been spreading fake news URLs on Twitter and its significant impact on making other Twitter users believe misleading information.

3.1.2.3 Fake media . It is now possible to manipulate or reproduce content in 2D or even 3D through AI technology. In particular, the advent of fake news using Deepfake technology (combining various images on an original video and generating a different video) has raised another major social concern that had not been imagined before. Due to the popularity of image or video sharing on social media, such media types have become the dominant form of news consumption, and the Deepfake technology itself is becoming more advanced and applied to images and videos in a variety of domains. We witnessed a video clip of former US President Barack Obama criticizing Donald Trump, which was manipulated by the US online media company BuzzFeed to highlight the influence and danger of Deepfake, causing substantial social confusion [ 56 ].

3.2 Internal factors: Fake news creation purposes

We identified three main purposes for fake news creation— (1) ideological purposes, (2) monetary purposes, and (3) fear/panic reduction .

3.2.1 Ideological purpose.

Fake news has been created and propagated for political purposes by individuals or groups that positively affect the parties or candidates they support or undermine those who are not on the same side. Fake news with this political purpose has shown to negatively influence people and society. For instance, Russia created a fake Facebook account that caused many political disputes and enhanced polarization, affecting the 2016 US Presidential Election [ 57 ]. As polarization has intensified, there has also been a trend in the US that “unfriending” people who have different political tendencies [ 58 ]. This has led the public to decide whether to trust the news or not regardless of its factuality and has resulted in worsening in-group biases. During the Brexit campaign in the UK, many selective news articles were exposed on Facebook, and social bots and trolls were also confirmed as being involved in creating public opinions [ 59 , 60 ].

3.2.2 Monetary purpose.

Financial benefit is another strong motivation for many fake news creators [ 34 , 61 ]. Fake news websites usually reach the public through social media and make profits through posted advertisements. The majority of fake websites are focused on earning advertising revenue by spreading fake news that would attract readers’ attention, rather than political goals. For example, during the 2016 US Presidential Election in Macedonia, young people in their 10s and 20s used content from some extremely right-leaning blogs in the US to mass-produce fake news, earning huge advertising revenues [ 62 ]. This is also why fake news creators use provocative titles, such as clickbait headlines, to induce clicks and attempt to produce as many fake news articles as possible.

3.2.3 Fear and panic reduction.

In general, when epidemics become more common around the world, rumors of absurd and false medical tips spread rapidly in social media. When there is a lack of verified information, people feel great anxious and afraid and easily believe such tips, regardless of whether they are true [ 63 , 64 ]. The term infodemic , which first appeared during the 2003 SARS pandemics, describes this phenomenon [ 65 ]. Regarding COVID-19, health authorities have recently announced that preventing the creation and propagation of fake news about the virus is as important as alleviating the contagious power of COVID-19 [ 66 , 67 ]. The spread of fake news due to the absence of verified information has become more common regarding health-related social issues (e.g., infectious diseases), natural disasters, etc. For example, people with disorders affecting cognition (e.g., neurodegenerative disorder) are tend to easily believe unverified medical news [ 68 – 70 ]. Robledo and Jankovic [ 68 ] confirmed that many fake or exaggerated medical journals are misleading people with Parkinson’s disease by giving false hopes and unfounded fake articles. Another example is a rumor that climate activists set fire to raise awareness of climate change quickly spread as fake news [ 71 ], when a wildfire broke out in Australia in 2019. As a result, people became suspicious and tended to believe that the causes of climate change (e.g., global warming) may not be related to humans, despite scientific evidence and research data.

3.3 Fake news detection and prevention

The main purpose of fake news creation is to make people confused or deceived regardless of topic, social atmosphere, or timing. Due to this purpose, it appears that fake news tends to have similar frames and structural patterns. Many studies have attempted to mitigate the spread of fake news based on these identifiable patterns. In particular, research on developing computational models that detect fake information (text/images/videos), based on machine or deep learning techniques has been actively conducted, as summarized in Table 1 . Other modeling studies include the credibility of weblogs [ 84 , 85 ], communication quality [ 88 ], susceptibility level [ 90 ], and political stance [ 86 , 87 ]. The table was intended to characterize a research scope and direction of the development of fake information creation (e.g., the features employed in each model development), not to present an exhaustive list.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260080.t001

3.3.1 Fake text information detection.

Research has considered many text-based features, such as structural (e.g., website URLs and headlines with all capital letters or exclamations) and linguistic information (e.g., grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors) about the news. Research has also considered the sentiments of news articles, the frequency of the words used, user information, and who left comments on the news articles, and social network information among users (who were connected based on activities of commenting, replying, liking or following) were used as key features for model development. These text-based models have been developed for not only fake news articles but also other types of fake information, such as clickbaits, fake reviews, spams, and spammers. Many of the models developed in this context performed a binary classification that distinguished between fake and non-fake articles, with the accuracy of such models ranging from 86% to 93%. Mainstream news articles were used to build most models, and some studies used articles on social media, such as Twitter [ 15 , 17 ]. Some studies developed fake news detection models by extracting features from images, as well as text, in news articles [ 16 , 17 , 75 ].

3.3.2 Fake visual media detection.

The generative adversary network (GAN) is an unsupervised learning method that estimates the probability distribution of original data and allows an artificial neural network to produce similar distributions [ 109 ]. With the advancement of GAN, it has become possible to transform faces in images into those of others. However, photos of famous celebrities have been misused (e.g., being distorted into pornographic videos), increasing concerns about the possible misuse of such technology [ 110 ] (e.g., creating rumors about a certain political candidate). To mitigate this, research has been conducted to develop detection models for fake images. Most studies developed binary classification models (fake image or not), and the accuracy of fake image detection models was high, ranging from 81% to 97%. However, challenges still exist. Unlike fake news detection models that employ fact-checking websites or mainstream news as data verification or ground-truth, fake image detection models were developed using the same or slightly modified image datasets (e.g., CelebA [ 97 ], FFHQ [ 99 ]), asking for the collection and preparation of a large amount of highly diverse data.

4 Fake news consumption

4.1 external factors: fake news consumption circumstances.

The implicit social contract between civil society and the media has gradually disintegrated in modern society, and accordingly, citizens’ trust in the media began to decline [ 111 ]. In addition, the growing number of digital media platforms has changed people’s news consumption environment. This change has increased the diversity of news content and the autonomy of information creation and sharing. At the same time, however, it blurred the line between traditional mainstream media news and fake news in the Internet environment, contributing to polarization.

Here, we identified three external factors that have forced the public to encounter fake news: (1) the decline of trust in the mainstream media, (2) a high-choice media environment, and (3) the use of social media as a news platform .

4.1.1 Fall of mainstream media trust.

Misinformation and unverified or biased reports have gradually undermined the credibility of the mainstream media. According to the 2019 American mass media trust survey conducted by Gallup, only 13% of Americans said they trusted traditional mainstream media: newspapers or TV news [ 112 ]. The decline in traditional media trust is not only a problem for the US, but also a common concern in Europe and Asia [ 113 – 115 ].

4.1.2 High-choice media environment.

Over the past decade, news consumption channels have been radically diversified, and the mainstream has shifted from broadcasting and print media to mobile and social media environments. Despite the diversity of news consumption channels, personalized preferences and repetitive patterns have led people to be exposed to limited information and continue to consume such information increasingly [ 116 ]. This selective news consumption attitude has enhanced the polarization of the public in many multi-media environments [ 117 ]. In addition, the commercialization of digital platforms have created an environment in which cognitive bias can be easily strengthened. In other words, a digital platform based on recommended algorithms has the convenience of providing similar content continuously after a given type of content is consumed. As a result, it may be easy for users to fall into the echo chamber because they only access recommended content. A survey of 1,000 YouTube videos found that more than two-thirds of the videos contained content in favor of a particular candidate [ 118 ].

News consumption in social media does not simply mean the delivery of messages from creators to consumers. The multi-directionality of social media has blurred the boundaries between information creators and consumers. In other words, users are already interacting with one another in various fashions, and when a new interaction type emerges and is supported by the platform, users will display other types of new interactions, which will also influence ways of consuming news information.

4.1.3 Use of social media as news platform.

Here we focus on the most widely used social media platforms—YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter—where each has characteristics of encouraging limited news consumption.

First, YouTube is the most unidirectional of social media. Many YouTube creators tend to convey arguments in a strong, definitive tone through their videos, and these content characteristics make viewers judge the objectivity of the information via non-verbal elements (e.g., speaker, thumbnail, title, comments) rather than facts. Furthermore, many comments often support the content of the video, which may increase the chances of viewers accepting somewhat biased information. In addition, a YouTube video recommendation algorithm causes users who watch certain news to continuously be exposed to other news containing the same or similar information. This behavior and direction on the part of isolated content consumption could undermine the viewer’s media literacy, and is likely to create a screening effect that blocks the user’s eyes and ears.

Second, Facebook is somewhat invisible regarding the details of news articles because this platform ostensibly shows only the title, the number of likes, and the comments of the posts. Often, users have to click on the article and go to the URL to read the article. This structure and consumptive content orientation on the part of Facebook presents obstacles that prevent users from checking the details of their posts. As a result, users have become likely to make limited and biased judgments and perceive content through provocative headlines and comments.

Third, the largest feature of Twitter is anonymity because Twitter asks users to make their own pseudonyms [ 119 ]. Twitter has a limited number of letters to upload, and compared to other platforms, users can produce and spread indiscriminate information anonymously and do not know who is behind the anonymity [ 120 , 121 ]. On the other hand, many accounts on Facebook operate under real names and generally share information with others who are friends or followers. Information creators are not held accountable for anonymous information.

4.2 Internal factors: Cognitive mechanism

Due to the characteristics of the Internet and social media, people are accustomed to consuming information quickly, such as reading only news headlines and checking photos in news articles. This type of news consumption practice could lead people to consider news information mostly based on their beliefs or values. This practice can make it easier for people to fall into an echo chamber and further social confusion. We identified two internal factors affecting fake news consumption: (1) cognitive biases and (2) personal traits (see Fig 6 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260080.g006

4.2.1 Cognitive biases.

Cognitive bias is an observer effect that is broadly recognized in cognitive science and includes basic statistical and memory errors [ 8 ]. However, this bias may vary depending on what factors are most important to affect individual judgments and choices. We identified five cognitive biases that affect fake news consumption: confirmation bias, in-group bias, choice-supportive bias, cognitive dissonance, and primacy effect.

Confirmation bias relates to a human tendency to seek out information in line with personal thoughts or beliefs, as well as to ignore information that goes against such beliefs. This stems from the human desire to be reaffirmed, rather than accept denials of one’s opinion or hypothesis. If the process of confirmation bias is repeated, a more solid belief is gradually formed, and the belief remains unchanged even after encountering logical and objective counterexamples. Evaluating information with an objective attitude is essential to properly investigating any social phenomenon. However, confirmation bias significantly hinders this. Kunda [ 122 ] discussed experiments that investigated the cognitive processes as a function of accuracy goals and directional goals. Her analysis demonstrated that people use different cognitive processes to achieve the two different goals. For those who pursue accuracy goals (reaching a “right conclusion”), information is used as a tool to determine whether they are right or not [ 123 ], and for those with directional goals (reaching a desirable conclusion), information is used as a tool to justify their claims. Thus, biased information processing is more frequently observed by people with directional goals [ 124 ].

People with directional goals have a desire to reach the conclusion they want. The more we emphasize the seriousness and omnipresence of fake news, the less people with directional goals can identify fake news. Moreover, their confirmation bias through social media could result in an echo chamber, triggering a differentiation of public opinion in the media. The algorithm of the media platform further strengthens the tendency of biased information consumption (e.g., filter bubble).

In-group bias is a phenomenon in which an individual favors a group that he or she belongs to. The causes of in-group bias are two [ 125 ]. One is a categorization process, which exaggerates the similarities between members within one category (the internal group) and differences with others (the external groups). Consequently, positive reactions towards the internal group and negative reactions (e.g., hostility) towards the external group are both increased. The other reason is self-respect based on social identity theory. To positively evaluate the internal group, a member tends to perceive that other group members are similar to himself or herself.

In-group bias has a significant impact on fake news consumption because of radical changes in the media environment [ 126 ]. The public recognizes and forms groups based on issues through social media. The emotions and intentions of such groups of people online can be easily transferred or developed into offline activities, such as demonstrations and rallies. Information exchanges within such internal groups proceeds similarly to the situation with confirmation bias. If confirmation bias is keeping to one’s beliefs, in-group bias equates the beliefs of my group with my beliefs.

Choice-supportive bias refers to an individual’s tendency to justify his or her decision by highlighting the evidence that he or she did not consider in making the decision [ 127 ]. For instance, people sometimes have no particular purpose when they purchase a certain brand of products or service, or support a particular politician or political party. They emphasize that their choices at the time were right and inevitable. They also tend to focus more on positive aspects than negative effects or consequences to justify their choice. However, these positive aspects can be distorted because they are mainly based on memory. Thus, choice-supportive bias, can be regarded as the cognitive errors caused by memory distortion.

The behavioral condition of choice-supportive bias is used to justify oneself, which usually occurs in the context of external factors (e.g., maintaining social status or relationships) [ 7 ]. For example, if people express a certain political opinion within a social group, people may seek information with which to justify the opinion and minimize its flaws. In this procedure, people may accept fake news as a supporting source for their opinions.

Cognitive dissonance was based on the notion that some psychological tension would occur when an individual had two perceptions that were inconsistent [ 128 ]. Humans have a desire to identify and resolve the psychological tension that occurs when a cognitive dissonance is established. Regarding fake news consumption, people easily accept fake news if it is aligned with their beliefs or faith. However, if such news is seen as working against their beliefs or faith, people define even real news as fake and consume biased information in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. This is quite similar to cognitive bias. Selective exposure to biased information intensifies its extent and impact in social media. In these circumstances, an individual’s cognitive state is likely to be formed by information from unclear sources, which can be seen as a negative state of perception. In that case, information consumers selectively consume only information that can be in harmony with negative perceptions.

Primacy effect means that information presented previously will have a stronger effect on the memory and decision-making than information presented later [ 129 ]. The “interference theory [ 130 ]” is often referred to as a theoretical basis for supporting the primacy effect, which highlights the fact that the impression formed by the information presented earlier influences subsequent judgments and the process of forming the next impression.

The significance of the primary effect for fake news consumption is that it can be a starting point for biased cognitive processes. If an individual first encounters an issue in fake news and does not go through a critical thinking process about that information, he or she may form false attitudes regarding the issue [ 131 , 132 ]. Fake news is a complex combination of facts and fiction, making it difficult for information consumers to correctly judge whether the news is right or wrong. These cognitive biases induce the selective collection of information that feels more valid for news consumers, rather than information that is really valid.

4.2.2 Personal traits.

We two aspects of personal characteristics or traits can influence one’s behaviors in terms of news consumption: susceptibility and personality.

4.2.2.1 Susceptibility . The most prominent feature of social media is that consumers can be also creators, and the boundaries between the creators and consumers of information become unclear. New media literacy (i.e., the ability to critically and suitably consume messages in a variety of digital media channels, such as social media) can have a significant impact on the degree of consumption and dissemination of fake news [ 133 , 134 ]. In other words, the higher new media literacy is, the higher the probability that an individual is likely to take a critical standpoint toward fake news. Also, the susceptibility level of fake news is related to one’s selective news consumption behaviors. Bessi et al. [ 35 ] studied misinformation on Facebook and found that users who frequently interact with alternative media tend to interact with intentionally false claims more often.

Personality is an individual’s traits or behavior style. Many scholars have agreed that the personality can be largely divided into five categories (Big Five)—extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and conscientiousness [ 135 , 136 ]—and used them to understand the relationship between personality and news consumption.

Extroversion is related to active information use. Previous studies have confirmed that extroverts tend to use social media and that their main purpose of use is to acquire information [ 137 ] and better determine the factuality of news on social media [ 138 ]. Furthermore, people with high agreeableness, which refers to how friendly, warm, and tactful, tend to trust real news than fake news [ 138 ]. Neuroticism refers to a broad personality trait dimension representing the degree to which a person experiences the world as distressing, threatening, and unsafe. People with high neuroticism usually show negative emotions or information sharing behavior [ 139 ]. Neuroticism is positively related to fake news consumption [ 138 ]. Openness refers to the degree of enjoying new experiences. High openness is associated with high curiosity and engagement in learning [ 140 ], which enhances critical thinking ability and decreases negative effects of fake news consumption [ 138 , 141 ]. Conscientiousness refers to a person’s work ethic, being orderly, and thoroughness [ 142 ]. People with high conscientiousness tend to regard social media use as distraction from their tasks [ 143 – 145 ].

4.3 Fake news awareness and prevention

4.3.1 decision-making support tools..

News on social media does not go through the verification process, because of its high degree of freedom to create, share, and access information. The study reported that most citizens in advanced countries will have more fake information than real information in 2022 [ 146 ]. This indicates that potential personal and social damage from fake news may increase. Paradoxically, many countries that suffer from fake news problems strongly guarantee the freedom of expression under their constitutions; thus, it would be very difficult to block all possible production and distribution of fake news sources through laws and regulations. In this respect, it would be necessary to put in place not only technical efforts to detect and prevent the production and dissemination of fake news but also social efforts to make news consumers aware of the characteristics of online fake information.

Inoculation theory highlights that human attitudes and beliefs can form psychological resistance by being properly exposed to arguments against belief in advance. To have the ability to strongly protest an argument, it is necessary to expose and refute the same sort of content with weak arguments first. Doris-Down et al. [ 147 ] asked people who were from different political backgrounds to communicate directly through mobile apps and investigated whether these methods alleviated their echo-chamberness. As a result, the participants made changes, such as realizing that they had a lot in common with people who had conflicting political backgrounds and that what they thought was different was actually trivial. Karduni et al. [ 148 ] provided comprehensive information (e.g., connections among news accounts and a summary of the location entities) to study participants through the developed visual analytic system and examined how they accepted fake news. Another study was conducted to confirm how people determine the veracity of news by establishing a system similar to social media and analyzing the eye tracking of the study participants while reading fake news articles [ 28 ].

Some research has applied the inoculation theory to gamification. A “Bad News” game was designed to proactively warn people and expose them to a certain amount of false information through interactions with the gamified system [ 29 , 149 ]. The results confirmed the high effectiveness of inoculation through the game and highlighted the need to educate people about how to respond appropriately to misinformation through computer systems and games [ 29 ].

4.3.2 Fake information propagation analysis.

Fake information tends to show a certain pattern in terms of consumption and propagation, and many studies have attempted to identify the propagation patterns of fake information (e.g., the count of unique users, the depth of a network) [ 150 – 153 ].

4.3.2.1 Psychological characteristics . The theoretical foundation of research intended to examine the diffusion patterns of fake news lies in psychology [ 154 , 155 ] because psychological theories explain why and how people react to fake news. For instance, a news consumer who comes across fake news will first have doubts, judge the news against his background knowledge, and want to clarify the sources in the news. This series of processes ends when sufficient evidence is collected. Then the news consumer ends in accepting, ignoring, or suspecting the news. The psychological elements that can be defined in this process are doubts, negatives, conjectures, and skepticism [ 156 ].

4.3.2.2 Temporal characteristics . Fake news exhibits different propagation patterns from real news. The propagation of real news tends to slowly decrease over time after a single peak in the public’s interest, whereas fake news does not have a fixed timing for peak consumption, and a number of peaks appear in many cases [ 157 ]. Tambuscio et al. [ 151 ] proved that the pattern of the spread of rumors is similar to the existing epidemic model [ 158 ]. Their empirical observations confirmed that the same fake news reappears periodically and infects news consumers. For example, rumors that include the malicious political message that “Obama is a Muslim” are still being spread a decade later [ 159 ]. This pattern of proliferation and consumption shows that fake news may be consumed for a certain purpose.

5 A mental-model approach

We have examined news consumers’ susceptibility to fake news due to internal and external factors, including personal traits, cognitive biases, and the contexts. Beyond an investigation on the factor level, we seek to understand people’s susceptibility to misinformation by considering people’s internal representations and external environments holistically [ 5 ]. Specifically, we propose to comprehend people’s mental models of fake news. In this section, we first briefly introduce mental models and discuss their connection to misinformation. Then, we discuss the potential contribution of using a mental-model approach to the field of misinformation.

5.1 Mental models

A mental model is an internal representation or simulation that people carry in their minds of how the world works [ 160 , 161 ]. Typically, mental models are constructed in people’s working memory, in which information from long-term memory and the environments are combined [ 162 ]. They also indicate that individuals represent complex phenomena with somewhat abstraction based on their own experiences and understanding of the contexts. People rely on mental models to understand and predict their interactions with environments, artifacts and computing systems, as well as other individuals [ 163 , 164 ]. Generally, individuals’ ability to represent the continually changing environments is limited and unique. Thus, mental models tend to be functional and dynamic but not necessarily accurate or complete [ 163 , 165 ]. Mental models also differ between various groups and in particular between experts and novices [ 164 , 166 ].

5.2 Mental models and misinformation

Mental models have been proposed to understand human behaviors in spatial navigation [ 167 ], learning [ 168 , 169 ], deductive reasoning [ 170 ], mental presentations of real or imagined situations [ 171 ], risk communication [ 172 ], and usable cybersecurity and privacy [ 166 , 173 , 174 ]. People use mental models to facilitate their comprehension, judgment, and actions, and can be the basis of individual behaviors. In particular, the connection between a mental-model approach and misinformation has been revealed in risk communication regarding vaccines [ 175 , 176 ]. For example, Downs et al. [ 176 ] interviewed 30 parents from three US cities to understand their mental models about vaccination for their children aged 18 to 23 months. The results revealed two mental models about vaccination: (1) heath oriented : parents who focused on health-oriented topics trusted anecdotal communication more than statistical arguments; and (2) risk oriented : parents with some knowledge about vaccine mechanisms trusted communication with statistical arguments more than anecdotal information. Also, the authors found that many parents, even those favorable to vaccination, can be confused by ongoing debate, suggesting somewhat incompleteness of their mental models.

5.3 Potential contributions of a mental-model approach

Recognizing and dealing with the plurality of news consumers’ perception, cognition and actions is currently considered as key aspects of misinformation research. Thus, a mental model approach could significantly improve our understanding of people’s susceptibility to misinformation, as well as inform the development of mechanisms to mitigate misinformation.

One possible direction is to investigate the demographic differences in the context of mental models. As more Americans have adopted social media, the social media users have become more representative for the population. Usage by older adults has increased in recent years, with the use rate of about 12% in 2012 to about 35% in 2016 ( https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/ ). Guess et al. (2019) analyzed participants’ profiles and their sharing activity on Facebook during the 2016 US Presidential campaign. A strong age effect was revealed. While controlled the effects of ideology and education, their results showed that Facebook users who are over 65 years old were associated with sharing nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains on Facebook as those who are between 18–29 years old, or about 2.3 times as many as those in the age between 45 to 65.

Besides older adults, college students were shown more susceptibility to misinformation [ 177 ]. We can identify which mental models a particular age group ascribes to, and compare the incompleteness or incorrectness of the mental models by age. On the other hand, such comparison might be informative to design general mechanisms to mitigate misinformation independent of the different concrete mental models possessed by different types of users.

Users’ actions and decisions are directed by their mental models. We can also explore news consumers’ mental models and discover unanticipated and potentially risky human system interactions, which will inform the development and design of user interactions and education endeavors to mitigate misinformation.

A mental-model approach supplies an important, and as yet unconsidered, dimension to fake news research. To date, research on people’s susceptibility to fake news in social media has lagged behind research on computational aspect research on fake news. Scholars have not considered issues of news consumers’ susceptibility across the spectrum of their internal representations and external environments. An investigation from the mental model’s perspective is a step toward addressing such need.

6 Discussion and future work

In this section, we highlight the importance of balancing research efforts on fake news creation and consumption and discuss potential future directions of fake news research.

6.1 Leveraging insights of social science to model development

Developing fake news detection models has achieved great performance. Feature groups used in the model are diverse including linguistics, vision, sentiment, topic, user, and network, and many models used multiple groups to increase the performance. By using datasets with different size and characteristics, research has demonstrated the effectiveness of the models through a comparison analysis. However, much research has considered and used the features that are easily quantifiable, and many of them tend to have unclear justification or rationale of being used in modeling. For example, what is the relationship between the use of question (?), exclamation (!), or quotation marks (“…”) and fake news?, what does it mean by a longer description relates to news trustworthiness?. There are also many important aspects that can be used as additional features for modeling and have not yet found a way to be quantified. For example, journalistic styles are important characteristics that determine a level of information credibility [ 156 ], but it is challenging to accurately and reliably quantified them. There are many intentions (e.g., ideological standpoint, financial gain, panic creation) that authors may implicitly or explicitly display in the post but measuring them is uneasy and not straightforward. Social science research can play a role in here coming up with a valid research methodology to measure such subjective perceptions or notions considering various types and characteristics of them depending on a context or environment. Some research efforts in this research direction include quantifying salient factors of people’s decision-making identified in social science research and demonstrating the effectiveness of using the factors in improving model performance and interpreting model results [ 70 ]. Yet more research that applies socio-technical aspects in model development and application would be needed to better study complex characteristics of fake news.

6.1.1 Future direction.

Insights from social science may help develop transparent and applicable fake news detection models. Such socio-technical models may allow news consumers to have a better understanding of fake news detection results and its application as well as to take more appropriate actions to control fake news phenomenon.

6.2 Lack of research on fake news consumption

Regarding fake news consumption, we confirmed that only few studies involve the development of web- or mobile-based technology systems to help consumers aware possible dangers of fake news. Those studies [ 28 , 29 , 147 , 148 ] tried to demonstrate the feasibility of developed self-awareness systems through user studies. However, due to the limited number of study participants (min: 11, max: 60) and their lack of demographic diversity (i.e., recruited only college students of one school, the psychology research pool at the authors’ institution), the generalization and applicability of these systems are still questionable. On the other hand, research that involves the development of fake news detection models or network analysis to identify the pattern of fake news propagation has been relatively active. These results can be used to identify people (or entities) who intentionally create malicious fake content; however, it is still challenging to restrict people who originally had not shown any behaviors or indications of sharing or creating fake information but later manipulated real news to fake or disseminated fake news with their malicious intention or cognitive biases.

In other words, although fake news detection models have shown great, promising performance, the influence of the models may be exerted in limited cases. This is because fake news detection models heavily rely on the data that were labeled as fake by other fact-checking institutions or sites. If someone manipulates the news that were not covered by fact-checking, the format or characteristics of the manipulated news may be different from those (i.e., conventional features) that are identified and managed in the detection model. Such differences may not be captured by the model. Therefore, to prevent fake news phenomenon more effectively, research needs to consider changes of news consumption.

6.2.1 Future direction.

It may be desirable to support people recognizing that their news consumption behaviors (e.g., like, comment, share) can have a significant ripple effect. Developing a system that tracks activities of people’s news consumption and creation, measures similarity and differences between those activities, and presents behaviors or patterns of news consumption and creation to people would be helpful.

6.3 Limited coverage of fact-checking websites and regulatory approach

Some of the well-known fact-checking websites (e.g., snopes.com, politifact.com) cover news shared mostly on the Internet and label the authenticity or deficiencies of the content (e.g., miscaptioned, legend, misattributed). However, these fact-checking websites may show limited coverage in that they are only used for those who are willing to check the veracity of certain news articles. Social media platforms have been making continuous efforts to mitigate the spread of fake news. For example, Facebook shows that content that has been falsely assessed by fact-checkers is relatively less exposed to news feeds or shows warning indicators [ 178 ]. Instagram has also changed the way that warning labels are displayed when users attempt to view the content that has been falsely assessed [ 179 ]. However, this type of an interface could lead news consumers to relying on algorithmic decision-making rather than self-judgment because these ostensible regulations (e.g., warning labels) tend to lack transparency of the decision. As we explained previously, this is related to filter bubbles. Therefore, it is important to provide a more clear and transparent communicative interface for news consumers to access and understand underlying information of the algorithm results.

6.3.1 Future direction.

It is necessary to create a news consumption circumstance that gives a wider coverage of fake news and more transparent information of algorithmic decisions on news credibility. This will help news consumers preemptively avoid fake news consumption and contribute more to preventing fake news propagation. Consumers also make more proper and accurate decisions based on their understanding of the news.

6.4 New media literacy

With the diversification of news channels, we can easily consume news. However, we are also in a media environment that asks us to self-critically verify news content (e.g., whether the news title reads like a clickbait, whether the news title and content are related), which in reality is hard to be done. Moreover, in social media, news consumers can be news creators or reproducers. During this process, news information could be changed based on a consumer’s beliefs or interests. A problem here is that people may not know how to verify news content or not be aware of whether the information could be distorted or biased. As the news consumer environment changes rapidly and faces modern media deluge, the importance of media literacy education is high. Media literacy refers to the ability to decipher media content, but in a broad sense, to understand the principles of media operation and media content sensibly and critically, and in turn to the ability to utilize and creatively reproduce content. Being a “lazy thinker” is more susceptible to fake news than having a “partisan bias” [ 32 ]. As “screen time” (i.e., time spent looking at smartphone, computer, or television screens) has become more common, people are consuming only stimulating (e.g., sensual pleasure and excitement) information [ 180 ]. This could gradually lower one’s ability of critical, reasonable thinking, leading to making wrong judgments and actions. In France, when fake news problem became more serious, and a great amount of efforts were made to create “European Media Literacy Week” in schools [ 181 ]. The US is also making legislative efforts to add media literacy to the general education curriculum [ 182 ]. However, the acquisition of new media literacy through education may be limited to people in school (e.g., young students) and would be challenging to be expanded to wider populations. Thus, there is also a need for supplementary tools and research efforts to support more people to critically interpret and appropriately consume news.

In addition, more critical social attention is needed because visual content (e.g., images, videos), which had been naturally accepted as facts, can be easily manipulated in a malicious fashion and looked very natural. We have seen that people prefer to watch YouTube videos for news consumption rather than reading news articles. This visual content makes it relatively easy for news consumers to trust the content compared to text-based information and makes it easier to obtain information simply by playing the video. Since visual content will become a more dominant medium in future news consumption, educating and inoculating news consumers about potential threats of fake information in such news media would be important. More attention and research are needed on the technology supporting fake visual content awareness.

6.4.1 Future direction.

Research in both computer science and social science should find ways (e.g., developing a game-based education system or curriculum) to help news consumers aware of their practice of news consumption and maintain right news consumption behaviors.

7 Conclusion

We presented a comprehensive summary of fake news research through the lenses of news creation and consumption. The trends analysis indicated a growing increase in fake news research and a great amount of research focus on news creation compared to news consumption. By looking into internal and external factors, we unpacked the characteristics of fake news creation and consumption and presented the use of people’s mental models to better understand people’s susceptibility to misinformation. Based on the reviews, we suggested four future directions on fake news research—(1) a socio-technical model development using insights from social science, (2) in-depth understanding of news consumption behaviors, (3) preemptive decision-making and action support, and (4) educational, new media literacy support—as ways to reduce the gap between news creation and consumption and between computer science and social science research and to support healthy news environments.

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A literature review is a document or section of a document that collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other (also called synthesis ). The lit review is an important genre in many disciplines, not just literature (i.e., the study of works of literature such as novels and plays). When we say “literature review” or refer to “the literature,” we are talking about the research ( scholarship ) in a given field. You will often see the terms “the research,” “the scholarship,” and “the literature” used mostly interchangeably.

Where, when, and why would I write a lit review?

There are a number of different situations where you might write a literature review, each with slightly different expectations; different disciplines, too, have field-specific expectations for what a literature review is and does. For instance, in the humanities, authors might include more overt argumentation and interpretation of source material in their literature reviews, whereas in the sciences, authors are more likely to report study designs and results in their literature reviews; these differences reflect these disciplines’ purposes and conventions in scholarship. You should always look at examples from your own discipline and talk to professors or mentors in your field to be sure you understand your discipline’s conventions, for literature reviews as well as for any other genre.

A literature review can be a part of a research paper or scholarly article, usually falling after the introduction and before the research methods sections. In these cases, the lit review just needs to cover scholarship that is important to the issue you are writing about; sometimes it will also cover key sources that informed your research methodology.

Lit reviews can also be standalone pieces, either as assignments in a class or as publications. In a class, a lit review may be assigned to help students familiarize themselves with a topic and with scholarship in their field, get an idea of the other researchers working on the topic they’re interested in, find gaps in existing research in order to propose new projects, and/or develop a theoretical framework and methodology for later research. As a publication, a lit review usually is meant to help make other scholars’ lives easier by collecting and summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing existing research on a topic. This can be especially helpful for students or scholars getting into a new research area, or for directing an entire community of scholars toward questions that have not yet been answered.

What are the parts of a lit review?

Most lit reviews use a basic introduction-body-conclusion structure; if your lit review is part of a larger paper, the introduction and conclusion pieces may be just a few sentences while you focus most of your attention on the body. If your lit review is a standalone piece, the introduction and conclusion take up more space and give you a place to discuss your goals, research methods, and conclusions separately from where you discuss the literature itself.

Introduction:

An introductory paragraph that explains what your working topic and thesis is
A forecast of key topics or texts that will appear in the review
Potentially, a description of how you found sources and how you analyzed them for inclusion and discussion in the review (more often found in published, standalone literature reviews than in lit review sections in an article or research paper)
Summarize and synthesize: Give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
Analyze and interpret: Don’t just paraphrase other researchers – add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
Critically Evaluate: Mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
Write in well-structured paragraphs: Use transition words and topic sentence to draw connections, comparisons, and contrasts.

Conclusion:

Summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance
Connect it back to your primary research question

How should I organize my lit review?

Lit reviews can take many different organizational patterns depending on what you are trying to accomplish with the review. Here are some examples:

Chronological : The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time, which helps familiarize the audience with the topic (for instance if you are introducing something that is not commonly known in your field). If you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order. Try to analyze the patterns, turning points, and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred (as mentioned previously, this may not be appropriate in your discipline — check with a teacher or mentor if you’re unsure).
Thematic : If you have found some recurring central themes that you will continue working with throughout your piece, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic. For example, if you are reviewing literature about women and religion, key themes can include the role of women in churches and the religious attitude towards women.
Qualitative versus quantitative research
Empirical versus theoretical scholarship
Divide the research by sociological, historical, or cultural sources
Theoretical : In many humanities articles, the literature review is the foundation for the theoretical framework. You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts. You can argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach or combine various theorical concepts to create a framework for your research.

What are some strategies or tips I can use while writing my lit review?

Any lit review is only as good as the research it discusses; make sure your sources are well-chosen and your research is thorough. Don’t be afraid to do more research if you discover a new thread as you’re writing. More info on the research process is available in our "Conducting Research" resources .

As you’re doing your research, create an annotated bibliography ( see our page on the this type of document ). Much of the information used in an annotated bibliography can be used also in a literature review, so you’ll be not only partially drafting your lit review as you research, but also developing your sense of the larger conversation going on among scholars, professionals, and any other stakeholders in your topic.

Usually you will need to synthesize research rather than just summarizing it. This means drawing connections between sources to create a picture of the scholarly conversation on a topic over time. Many student writers struggle to synthesize because they feel they don’t have anything to add to the scholars they are citing; here are some strategies to help you:

It often helps to remember that the point of these kinds of syntheses is to show your readers how you understand your research, to help them read the rest of your paper.
Writing teachers often say synthesis is like hosting a dinner party: imagine all your sources are together in a room, discussing your topic. What are they saying to each other?
Look at the in-text citations in each paragraph. Are you citing just one source for each paragraph? This usually indicates summary only. When you have multiple sources cited in a paragraph, you are more likely to be synthesizing them (not always, but often
Read more about synthesis here.

The most interesting literature reviews are often written as arguments (again, as mentioned at the beginning of the page, this is discipline-specific and doesn’t work for all situations). Often, the literature review is where you can establish your research as filling a particular gap or as relevant in a particular way. You have some chance to do this in your introduction in an article, but the literature review section gives a more extended opportunity to establish the conversation in the way you would like your readers to see it. You can choose the intellectual lineage you would like to be part of and whose definitions matter most to your thinking (mostly humanities-specific, but this goes for sciences as well). In addressing these points, you argue for your place in the conversation, which tends to make the lit review more compelling than a simple reporting of other sources.

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Ace your research with these 5 literature review tools (+2 bonus tools)

Your literature review is the lore behind your research paper. It comes in two forms, systematic and scoping , both serving the purpose of rounding up previously published works in your research area that led you to write and finish your own.

A literature review is vital as it provides the reader with a critical overview of the existing body of knowledge, your methodology, and an opportunity for research applications.

Some steps to follow while writing your review:

Pick an accessible topic for your paper
Do thorough research and gather evidence surrounding your topic
Read and take notes diligently
Create a rough structure for your review
Synthesis your notes and write the first draft
Edit and proofread your literature review

Five literature review tools to improve research workflow

A literature review is one of the most critical yet tedious stages in composing a research paper. Many students find it an uphill task since it requires extensive reading and careful organization .

Using the literature review tools listed here, you can make your life easier by overcoming some of the existing challenges in literature reviews. From collecting and classifying to analyzing and publishing research outputs, these tools help you with your literature survey and improve your productivity without additional effort or expenses.

1. SciSpace

You can discover, read, and understand research papers with SciSpace making it an excellent platform for literature review. Featuring a repository with over 250 million research papers, it comes with an AI assistant called Copilot that offers explanations, summaries, and answers as you read.

Get started now:

Identify relevant articles faster

Abstracts are not always enough to determine whether a paper is relevant to your research question. For starters, you can ask questions to Copilot to explore the content and better understand the article. Additionally, use the summarize feature to quickly review the methodology and results of a paper and decide if it is worth reading in detail.

Quickly skim through the paper and focus on the most relevant information with summarize and brainstorm questions feature on SciSpace Copilot

Learn in your preferred language

A significant portion of scientific literature is published in English, which can be a barrier for non-native English speakers. But with SciSpace Copilot, you can review, interact, and learn from research papers in any language you prefer — presently, it supports 75+ languages.

Read and understand scientific literature in over 75 languages with SciSpace Copilot

Integrates with Zotero

Import your PDFs directly from Zotero into your SciSpace library and use Copilot to comprehend your research papers. You can also highlight key sections, add notes to the PDF as you read, and even turn helpful explanations and answers from Copilot into notes for future review.

Understand math and complex concepts quickly

Come across complex mathematical equations or difficult concepts? Simply highlight the text or select the formula or table, and Copilot will provide an explanation or breakdown of the same in an easy-to-understand manner. You can ask follow-up questions if you need further clarification.

$Understand math and tables in research papers$

Find new papers to read without leaving

Highlight phrases or sentences in your research paper to get suggestions for related papers in the field and save time on literature reviews. You can also use the 'Trace' feature to move across and discover connected papers, authors, topics, and more.

SciSpace Copilot is now available as a Chrome extension , allowing you to access its features directly while you browse scientific literature anywhere across the web.

2. Mendeley

Mendeley Citation Manager is a free web and desktop application. It helps simplify your citation management workflow significantly. Here are some ways you can speed up your referencing game with Mendeley.

Generate citations and bibliographies

Easily add references from your Mendeley library to your Word document, change your citation style, and create a bibliography, all without leaving your document.

Retrieve references

It allows you to access your references quickly. Search for a term, and it will return results by referencing the year, author, or source.

Add sources to your Mendeley library by dragging PDF to Mendeley Reference Manager. Mendeley will automatically remove the PDF(s) metadata and create a library entry.‌

Read and annotate documents

It helps you highlight and comment across multiple PDFs while keep them all in one place using Mendeley Notebook . Notebook pages are not tied to a reference and let you quote from many PDFs.

Zotero is a free, open-source tool for managing citations that works as a plug-in on your browser. It helps you gather the information you need, cite your sources, lets you attach PDFs, notes, and images to your citations, and create bibliographies.

Import research articles to your database

Search for research articles on a keyword, and add relevant results to your database. Then, select the articles you are most interested in, and import them into Zotero.

Add bibliography in a variety of formats

With Zotero, you don’t have to scramble for different bibliography formats. Simply use the Zotero-Word plug-in to insert in-text citations and generate a bibliography.

Share your research

You can save a paper and sync it with an online library to easily share your research for group projects. Zotero can be used to create your database and decrease the time you spend formatting citations.

Sysrev facilitates screening, collaboration, and data extraction from academic publications, abstracts, and PDF documents using machine learning. The platform is free and supports public and Open Access projects only.

Some of the features of Sysrev include:

Group labels

Group labels can be a powerful concept for creating database tables from documents. When exported and re-imported, each group label creates a new table. To make labels for a project, go into the manage -> labels section of the project.

Group labels enable project managers to pull table information from documents. It makes it easier to communicate review results for specific articles.

Track reviewer performance

Sysrev's label counting tool provides filtering and visualization options for keeping track of the distribution of labels throughout the project's progress. Project managers can check their projects at any point to track progress and the reviewer's performance.

Tool for concordance

The Sysrev tool for concordance allows project administrators and reviewers to perform analysis on their labels. Concordance is measured by calculating the number of times users agree on the labels they have extracted.

Colandr is a free, open-source, internet-based analysis and screening software based on machine learning. It was designed to ease collaboration across various stages of the systematic review procedure. The tool can be a little complex to use. So, here are the steps involved in working with Colandr.

Create a review

The first step to using Colandr is setting up an organized review project. This is helpful to librarians who are assisting researchers with systematic reviews.

The planning stage is setting the review's objectives along with research queries. Any reviewer can review the details of the planning stage. However, they can only be modified by the author for the review.

Citation screening/import

In this phase, users can upload their results from database searches. Colandr also offers an automated deduplication system.

Full-text screening

The system in Colandr will discover the combination of terms and expressions that are most useful for the reader. If an article is selected, it will be moved to the final step.

Data extraction/export

Colandr data extraction is more efficient than the manual method. It creates the form fields for data extraction during the planning stage of the review procedure. Users can decide to revisit or modify the form for data extraction after completing the initial screening.

Bonus literature review tools

SRDR+ is a web-based tool for extracting and managing systematic review or meta-analysis data. It is open and has a searchable archive of systematic reviews and their data.

7. Plot Digitizer

Plot Digitizer is an efficient tool for extracting information from graphs and images, equipped with many features that facilitate data extraction. The program comes with a free online application, which is adequate to extract data quickly.

Final thoughts

Writing a literature review is not easy. It’s a time-consuming process, which can become tiring at times. The literature review tools mentioned in this blog do an excellent job of maximizing your efforts and helping you write literature reviews much more efficiently. With them, you can breathe a sigh of relief and give more time to your research.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. what is rrl in research.

RRL stands for Review of Related Literature and sometimes interchanged with ‘Literature Review.’ RRL is a body of studies relevant to the topic being researched. These studies may be in the form of journal articles, books, reports, and other similar documents. Review of related literature is used to support an argument or theory being made by the researcher, as well as to provide information on how others have approached the same topic.

2. What are few softwares and tools available for literature review?

• SciSpace Discover

• Mendeley

• Zotero

• Sysrev

• Colandr

• SRDR+

3. How to generate an online literature review?

The Scispace Discover tool, which offers an excellent repository of millions of peer-reviewed articles and resources, will help you generate or create a literature review easily. You may find relevant information by utilizing the filter option, checking its credibility, tracing related topics and articles, and citing in widely accepted formats with a single click.

4. What does it mean to synthesize literature?

To synthesize literature is to take the main points and ideas from a number of sources and present them in a new way. The goal is to create a new piece of writing that pulls together the most important elements of all the sources you read. Make recommendations based on them, and connect them to the research.

5. Should we write abstract for literature review?

Abstracts, particularly for the literature review section, are not required. However, an abstract for the research paper, on the whole, is useful for summarizing the paper and letting readers know what to expect from it. It can also be used to summarize the main points of the paper so that readers have a better understanding of the paper's content before they read it.

6. How do you evaluate the quality of a literature review?

• Whether it is clear and well-written.

• Whether Information is current and up to date.

• Does it cover all of the relevant sources on the topic.

• Does it provide enough evidence to support its conclusions.

7. Is literature review mandatory?

Yes. Literature review is a mandatory part of any research project. It is a critical step in the process that allows you to establish the scope of your research and provide a background for the rest of your work.

8. What are the sources for a literature review?

• Reports

• Theses

• Conference proceedings

• Company reports

• Some government publications

• Journals

• Books

• Newspapers

• Articles by professional associations

• Indexes

• Databases

• Catalogues

• Encyclopaedias

• Dictionaries

• Bibliographies

• Citation indexes

• Statistical data from government websites

9. What is the difference between a systematic review and a literature review?

A systematic review is a form of research that uses a rigorous method to generate knowledge from both published and unpublished data. A literature review, on the other hand, is a critical summary of an area of research within the context of what has already been published.

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How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on May 31, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

Search for relevant literature
Evaluate sources
Identify themes, debates, and gaps
Outline the structure
Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

Quick Run-through
Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

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Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

Your university’s library catalogue
Google Scholar
Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
EconLit (economics)
Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

What question or problem is the author addressing?
What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
What are the key theories, models, and methods?
Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
What are the results and conclusions of the study?
How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

Most research has focused on young women.
There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

Open Google Slides Download PowerPoint

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Sampling methods
Simple random sampling
Stratified sampling
Cluster sampling
Likert scales
Reproducibility

Statistics

Null hypothesis
Statistical power
Probability distribution
Effect size
Poisson distribution

Research bias

Optimism bias
Cognitive bias
Implicit bias
Hawthorne effect
Anchoring bias
Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An annotated bibliography is a list of source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a paper .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, May 31). How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates. Scribbr. Retrieved June 5, 2023, from https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/literature-review/

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Is it acceptable to use mainly websites in a literature review?

I'm writing a literature review for a project and due to the nature of the project (website and database) I haven't used any books etc. I have used a number of websites to get information on subjects such as hosting a website and a database using Azure, is it acceptable to use websites in a literature review?

literature-review

2 Answers 2

Website or not website is not the point. Printed journal articles are favored over website because i) they are peer-reviewed, carrying some degree of authority, ii) they are archived and retrievable, with payment or free of charge, and iii) once published, the contents do not change until they are formally revised, rebuked, or retracted.

So, it would mean that when citing websites, a few more steps need to be done to increase their worthiness. First, you'd need to assess the credibility of the website and be able to critically evaluate the contents. In journal articles this step is done to some degree but in websites you're on your own. Second, you may need to do most of the archiving (including downloading, dating, and archiving the data sets you may download, or printing and dating website into PDFs, etc.) or use website archiving to save a cross-section of the websites. There are free services like http://perma.cc and http://www.webcitation.org available.

Once they are archived, in your paper, it is a good practice to cite both original link and the archived link as well as the date you accessed the original link. For details, consult the project leader or editor. Some journals specialized in publishing Internet-related research such as Journal of Medical Internet Research may also provide useful format-related examples in their guide to the authors.

You can definitely put into references the official user documentation of your web server and database engine, as this software have not been just invented by you from scratch.

While websites can also be used in references, it seems to me that you may need more in depth coverage. Try to Google and find some real publications. If the topic seems too broad, it should be some reviews. If there is a Wikipedia article, check which references it uses.

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A Literature Review: Website Design and User Engagement

Renee garett.

1 ElevateU, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Sean D. Young

2 University of California Institute for Prediction Technology, Department of Family Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

3 UCLA Center for Digital Behavior, Department of Family Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Proper design has become a critical element needed to engage website and mobile application users. However, little research has been conducted to define the specific elements used in effective website and mobile application design. We attempt to review and consolidate research on effective design and to define a short list of elements frequently used in research. The design elements mentioned most frequently in the reviewed literature were navigation, graphical representation, organization, content utility, purpose, simplicity, and readability. We discuss how previous studies define and evaluate these seven elements. This review and the resulting short list of design elements may be used to help designers and researchers to operationalize best practices for facilitating and predicting user engagement.

1. INTRODUCTION

Internet usage has increased tremendously and rapidly in the past decade ( “Internet Use Over Time,” 2014 ). Websites have become the most important public communication portal for most, if not all, businesses and organizations. As of 2014, 87% of American adults aged 18 or older are Internet users ( “Internet User Demographics,” 2013 ). Because business-to-consumer interactions mainly occur online, website design is critical in engaging users ( Flavián, Guinalíu, & Gurrea, 2006 ; Lee & Kozar, 2012 ; Petre, Minocha, & Roberts, 2006 ). Poorly designed websites may frustrate users and result in a high “bounce rate”, or people visiting the entrance page without exploring other pages within the site ( Google.com, 2015 ). On the other hand, a well-designed website with high usability has been found to positively influence visitor retention (revisit rates) and purchasing behavior ( Avouris, Tselios, Fidas, & Papachristos, 2003 ; Flavián et al., 2006 ; Lee & Kozar, 2012 ).

Little research, however, has been conducted to define the specific elements that constitute effective website design. One of the key design measures is usability ( International Standardization Organization, 1998 ). The International Standardized Organization (ISO) defines usability as the extent to which users can achieve desired tasks (e.g., access desired information or place a purchase) with effectiveness (completeness and accuracy of the task), efficiency (time spent on the task), and satisfaction (user experience) within a system. However, there is currently no consensus on how to properly operationalize and assess website usability ( Lee & Kozar, 2012 ). For example, Nielson associates usability with learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction ( Nielsen, 2012 ). Yet, Palmer (2002) postulates that usability is determined by download time, navigation, content, interactivity, and responsiveness. Similar to usability, many other key design elements, such as scannability, readability, and visual aesthetics, have not yet been clearly defined ( Bevan, 1997 ; Brady & Phillips, 2003 ; Kim, Lee, Han, & Lee, 2002 ), and there are no clear guidelines that individuals can follow when designing websites to increase engagement.

This review sought to address that question by identifying and consolidating the key website design elements that influence user engagement according to prior research studies. This review aimed to determine the website design elements that are most commonly shown or suggested to increase user engagement. Based on these findings, we listed and defined a short list of website design elements that best facilitate and predict user engagement. The work is thus an exploratory research providing definitions for these elements of website design and a starting point for future research to reference.

2. MATERIALS AND METHODS

2.1. selection criteria and data extraction.

We searched for articles relating to website design on Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) because Google Scholar consolidates papers across research databases (e.g., Pubmed) and research on design is listed in multiple databases. We used the following combination of keywords: design, usability, and websites. Google Scholar yielded 115,000 total hits. However, due to the large list of studies generated, we decided to only review the top 100 listed research studies for this exploratory study. Our inclusion criteria for the studies was: (1) publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal, (2) publication in English, and (3) publication in or after 2000. Year of publication was chosen as a limiting factor so that we would have enough years of research to identify relevant studies but also have results that relate to similar styles of websites after the year 2000. We included studies that were experimental or theoretical (review papers and commentaries) in nature. Resulting studies represented a diverse range of disciplines, including human-computer interaction, marketing, e-commerce, interface design, cognitive science, and library science. Based on these selection criteria, thirty-five unique studies remained and were included in this review.

2.2. Final Search Term

(design) and (usability) and (websites).

The search terms were kept simple to capture the higher level design/usability papers and allow Google scholar’s ranking method to filter out the most popular studies. This method also allowed studies from a large range of fields to be searched.

2.3. Analysis

The literature review uncovered 20 distinct design elements commonly discussed in research that affect user engagement. They were (1) organization – is the website logically organized, (2) content utility – is the information provided useful or interesting, (3) navigation – is the website easy to navigate, (4) graphical representation – does the website utilize icons, contrasting colors, and multimedia content, (5) purpose – does the website clearly state its purpose (i.e. personal, commercial, or educational), (6) memorable elements – does the website facilitate returning users to navigate the site effectively (e.g., through layout or graphics), (7) valid links – does the website provide valid links, (8) simplicity – is the design of the website simple, (9) impartiality – is the information provided fair and objective, (10) credibility – is the information provided credible, (11) consistency/reliability – is the website consistently designed (i.e., no changes in page layout throughout the site), (12) accuracy – is the information accurate, (13) loading speed – does the website take a long time to load, (14) security/privacy – does the website securely transmit, store, and display personal information/data, (15) interactive – can the user interact with the website (e.g., post comments or receive recommendations for similar purchases), (16) strong user control capabilities– does the website allow individuals to customize their experiences (such as the order of information they access and speed at which they browse the website), (17) readability – is the website easy to read and understand (e.g., no grammatical/spelling errors), (18) efficiency – is the information presented in a way that users can find the information they need quickly, (19) scannability – can users pick out relevant information quickly, and (20) learnability – how steep is the learning curve for using the website. For each of the above, we calculated the proportion of studies mentioning the element. In this review, we provide a threshold value of 30%. We identified elements that were used in at least 30% of the studies and include these elements that are above the threshold on a short list of elements used in research on proper website design. The 30% value was an arbitrary threshold picked that would provide researchers and designers with a guideline list of elements described in research on effective web design. To provide further information on how to apply this list, we present specific details on how each of these elements was discussed in research so that it can be defined and operationalized.

3.1. Popular website design elements ( Table 1 )

Frequency of website design elements used in research (2000–2014)

Seven of the website design elements met our threshold requirement for review. Navigation was the most frequently discussed element, mentioned in 22 articles (62.86%). Twenty-one studies (60%) highlighted the importance of graphics. Fifteen studies (42.86%) emphasized good organization. Four other elements also exceeded the threshold level, and they were content utility (n=13, 37.14%), purpose (n=11, 31.43%), simplicity (n=11, 31.43%), and readability (n=11, 31.43%).

Elements below our minimum requirement for review include memorable features (n=5, 14.29%), links (n=10, 28.57%), impartiality (n=1, 2.86%), credibility (n=7, 20%), consistency/reliability (n=8. 22.86%), accuracy (n=5, 14.29%), loading speed (n=10, 28.57%), security/privacy (n=2, 5.71%), interactive features (n=9, 25.71%), strong user control capabilities (n=8, 22.86%), efficiency (n=6, 17.14%), scannability (n=1, 2.86%), and learnability (n=2, 5.71%).

3.2. Defining key design elements for user engagement ( Table 2 )

Definitions of Key Design Elements

In defining and operationalizing each of these elements, the research studies suggested that effective navigation is the presence of salient and consistent menu/navigation bars, aids for navigation (e.g., visible links), search features, and easy access to pages (multiple pathways and limited clicks/backtracking). Engaging graphical presentation entails 1) inclusion of images, 2) proper size and resolution of images, 3) multimedia content, 4) proper color, font, and size of text, 5) use of logos and icons, 6) attractive visual layout, 7) color schemes, and 8) effective use of white space. Optimal organization includes 1) cognitive architecture, 2) logical, understandable, and hierarchical structure, 3) information arrangement and categorization, 4) meaningful labels/headings/titles, and 5) use of keywords. Content utility is determined by 1) sufficient amount of information to attract repeat visitors, 2) arousal/motivation (keeps visitors interested and motivates users to continue exploring the site), 3) content quality, 4) information relevant to the purpose of the site, and 5) perceived utility based on user needs/requirements. The purpose of a website is clear when it 1) establishes a unique and visible brand/identity, 2) addresses visitors’ intended purpose and expectations for visiting the site, and 3) provides information about the organization and/or services. Simplicity is achieved by using 1) simple subject headings, 2) transparency of information (reduce search time), 3) website design optimized for computer screens, 4) uncluttered layout, 5) consistency in design throughout website, 6) ease of using (including first-time users), 7) minimize redundant features, and 8) easily understandable functions. Readability is optimized by content that is 1) easy to read, 2) well-written, 3) grammatically correct, 4) understandable, 5) presented in readable blocks, and 6) reading level appropriate.

4. DISCUSSION

The seven website design elements most often discussed in relation to user engagement in the reviewed studies were navigation (62.86%), graphical representation (60%), organization (42.86%), content utility (37.14%), purpose (31.43%), simplicity (31.43%), and readability (31.43%). These seven elements exceeded our threshold level of 30% representation in the literature and were included into a short list of website design elements to operationalize effective website design. For further analysis, we reviewed how studies defined and evaluated these seven elements. This may allow designers and researchers to determine and follow best practices for facilitating or predicting user engagement.

A remaining challenge is that the definitions of website design elements often overlap. For example, several studies evaluated organization by how well a website incorporates cognitive architecture, logical and hierarchical structure, systematic information arrangement and categorization, meaningful headings and labels, and keywords. However, these features are also crucial in navigation design. Also, the implications of using distinct logos and icons go beyond graphical representation. Logos and icons also establish unique brand/identity for the organization (purpose) and can serve as visual aids for navigation. Future studies are needed to develop distinct and objective measures to assess these elements and how they affect user engagement ( Lee & Kozar, 2012 ).

Given the rapid increase in both mobile technology and social media use, it is surprising that no studies mentioned cross-platform compatibility and social media integration. In 2013, 34% of cellphone owners primarily use their cellphones to access the Internet, and this number continues to grow ( “Mobile Technology Factsheet,” 2013 ). With the rise of different mobile devices, users are also diversifying their web browser use. Internet Explorer (IE) was once the leading web browser. However, in recent years, FireFox, Safari, and Chrome have gained significant traction ( W3schools.com, 2015 ). Website designers and researchers must be mindful of different platforms and browsers to minimize the risk of losing users due to compatibility issues. In addition, roughly 74% of American Internet users use some form of social media ( Duggan, Ellison, Lampe, Lenhart, & Smith, 2015 ), and social media has emerged as an effective platform for organizations to target and interact with users. Integrating social media into website design may increase user engagement by facilitating participation and interactivity.

There are several limitations to the current review. First, due to the large number of studies published in this area and due to this study being exploratory, we selected from the first 100 research publications on Google Scholar search results. Future studies may benefit from defining design to a specific topic, set of years, or other area to limit the number of search results. Second, we did not quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of these website design elements. Additional research can help to better quantify these elements.

It should also be noted that different disciplines and industries have different objectives in designing websites and should thus prioritize different website design elements. For example, online businesses and marketers seek to design websites that optimize brand loyalty, purchase, and profit ( Petre et al., 2006 ). Others, such as academic researchers or healthcare providers, are more likely to prioritize privacy/confidentiality, and content accuracy in building websites ( Horvath, Ecklund, Hunt, Nelson, & Toomey, 2015 ). Ultimately, we advise website designers and researchers to consider the design elements delineated in this review, along with their unique needs, when developing user engagement strategies.

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Should you trust media bias charts?

These controversial charts claim to show the political lean and credibility of news organizations. here’s what you need to know about them..

Impartial journalism is an impossible ideal. That is, at least, according to Julie Mastrine.

“Unbiased news doesn’t exist. Everyone has a bias: everyday people and journalists. And that’s OK,” Mastrine said. But it’s not OK for news organizations to hide those biases, she said.

“We can be manipulated into (a biased outlet’s) point of view and not able to evaluate it critically and objectively and understand where it’s coming from,” said Mastrine, marketing director for AllSides , a media literacy company focused on “freeing people from filter bubbles.”

That’s why she created a media bias chart.

As readers hurl claims of hidden bias towards outlets on all parts of the political spectrum, bias charts have emerged as a tool to reveal pernicious partiality.

Charts that use transparent methodologies to score political bias — particularly the AllSides chart and another from news literacy company Ad Fontes Media — are increasing in popularity and spreading across the internet. According to CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring platform, the homepages for these two sites and the pages for their charts have been shared tens of thousands of times.

But just because something is widely shared doesn’t mean it’s accurate. Are media bias charts reliable?

Why do media bias charts exist?

Traditional journalism values a focus on news reporting that is fair and impartial, guided by principles like truth, verification and accuracy. But those standards are not observed across the board in the “news” content that people consume.

Tim Groeling, a communications professor at the University of California Los Angeles, said some consumers take too much of the “news” they encounter as impartial.

When people are influenced by undisclosed political bias in the news they consume, “that’s pretty bad for democratic politics, pretty bad for our country to have people be consistently misinformed and think they’re informed,” Groeling said.

If undisclosed bias threatens to mislead some news consumers, it also pushes others away, he said.

“When you have bias that’s not acknowledged, but is present, that’s really damaging to trust,” he said.

Kelly McBride, an expert on journalism ethics and standards, NPR’s public editor and the chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at Poynter, agrees.

“If a news consumer doesn’t see their particular bias in a story accounted for — not necessarily validated, but at least accounted for in a story — they are going to assume that the reporter or the publication is biased,” McBride said.

The growing public confusion about whether or not news outlets harbor a political bias, disclosed or not, is fueling demand for resources to sort fact from otherwise — resources like these media bias charts.

Bias and social media

Mastrine said the threat of undisclosed biases grows as social media algorithms create filter bubbles to feed users ideologically consistent content.

Could rating bias help? Mastrine and Vanessa Otero, founder of the Ad Fontes media bias chart, think so.

“It’ll actually make it easier for people to identify different perspectives and make sure they’re reading across the spectrum so that they get a balanced understanding of current events,” Mastrine said.

Otero said bias ratings could also be helpful to advertisers.

“There’s this whole ecosystem of online junk news, of polarizing misinformation, these clickbaity sites that are sucking up a lot of ad revenue. And that’s not to the benefit of anybody,” Otero said. “It’s not to the benefit of the advertisers. It’s not to the benefit of society. It’s just to the benefit of some folks who want to take advantage of people’s worst inclinations online.”

Reliable media bias ratings could allow advertisers to disinvest in fringe sites.

Groeling, the UCLA professor, said he could see major social media and search platforms using bias ratings to alter the algorithms that determine what content users see. Changes could elevate neutral content or foster broader news consumption.

But he fears the platforms’ sweeping power, especially after Facebook and Twitter censored a New York Post article purporting to show data from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of President-elect Joe Biden. Groeling said social media platforms failed to clearly communicate how and why they stopped and slowed the spread of the article.

“(Social media platforms are) searching for some sort of arbiter of truth and news … but it’s actually really difficult to do that and not be a frightening totalitarian,” he said.

Is less more?

The Ad Fontes chart and the AllSides chart are each easy to understand: progressive publishers on one side, conservative ones on the other.

“It’s just more visible, more shareable. We think more people can see the ratings this way and kind of begin to understand them and really start to think, ‘Oh, you know, journalism is supposed to be objective and balanced,’” Mastrine said. AllSides has rated media bias since 2012. Mastrine first put them into chart form in early 2019.

Otero recognizes that accessibility comes at a price.

“Some nuance has to go away when it’s a graphic,” she said. “If you always keep it to, ‘people can only understand if they have a very deep conversation,’ then some people are just never going to get there. So it is a tool to help people have a shortcut.”

But perceiving the chart as distilled truth could give consumers an undue trust in outlets, McBride said.

“Overreliance on a chart like this is going to probably give some consumers a false level of faith,” she said. “I can think of a massive journalistic failure for just about every organization on this chart. And they didn’t all come clean about it.”

The necessity of getting people to look at the chart poses another challenge. Groeling thinks disinterest among consumers could hurt the charts’ usefulness.

“Asking people to go to this chart, asking them to take effort to understand and do that comparison, I worry would not actually be something people would do. Because most people don’t care enough about news,” he said. He would rather see a plugin that detects bias in users’ overall news consumption and offers them differing viewpoints.

McBride questioned whether bias should be the focus of the charts at all. Other factors — accountability, reliability and resources — would offer better insight into what sources of news are best, she said.

“Bias is only one thing that you need to pay attention to when you consume news. What you also want to pay attention to is the quality of the actual reporting and writing and the editing,” she said. It wouldn’t make sense to rate local news sources for bias, she added, because they are responsive to individual communities with different political ideologies.

The charts are only as good as their methodologies. Both McBride and Groeling shared praise for the stated methods for rating bias of AllSides and Ad Fontes , which can be found on their websites. Neither Ad Fontes nor AllSides explicitly rates editorial standards.

The AllSides Chart

(Courtesy: AllSides)

The AllSides chart focuses solely on political bias. It places sources in one of five boxes — “Left,” “Lean Left,” “Center,” “Lean Right” and “Right.” Mastrine said that while the boxes allow the chart to be easily understood, they also don’t allow sources to be rated on a gradient.

“Our five-point scale is inherently limited in the sense that we have to put somebody in a category when, in reality, it’s kind of a spectrum. They might fall in between two of the ratings,” Mastrine said.

That also makes the chart particularly easy to understand, she said.

AllSides has rated more than 800 sources in eight years, focusing on online content only. Ratings are derived from a mix of review methods.

In the blind bias survey, which Mastrine called “one of (AllSides’) most robust bias rating methodologies,” readers from the public rate articles for political bias. Two AllSides staffers with different political biases pull articles from the news sites that are being reviewed. AllSides locates these unpaid readers through its newsletter, website, social media account and other marketing tools. The readers, who self-report their political bias after they use a bias rating test provided by the company, only see the article’s text and are not told which outlet published the piece. The data is then normalized to more closely reflect the composure of America across political groupings.

AllSides also uses “editorial reviews,” where staff members look directly at a source to contribute to ratings.

“That allows us to actually look at the homepage with the branding, with the photos and all that and kind of get a feel for what the bias is, taking all that into account,” Mastrine said.

She added that an equal number of staffers who lean left, right and center conduct each review together. The personal biases of AllSides’ staffers appear on their bio pages . Mastrine leans right.

She clarified that among the 20-person staff, many are part time, 14% are people of color, 38% are lean left or left, 29% are center, and 18% are lean right or right. Half of the staffers are male, half are female.

When a news outlet receives a blind bias survey and an editorial review, both are taken into account. Mastrine said the two methods aren’t weighted together “in any mathematical way,” but said they typically hold roughly equal weight. Sometimes, she added, the editorial review carries more weight.

AllSides also uses “independent research,” which Mastrine described as the “lowest level of bias verification.” She said it consists of staffers reviewing and reporting on a source to make a preliminary bias assessment. Sometimes third-party analyses — including academic research and surveys — are incorporated into ratings, too.

AllSides highlights the specific methodologies used to judge each source on its website and states its confidence in the ratings based on the methods used. In a separate white paper , the company details the process used for its August 2020 blind bias survey.

AllSides sometimes gives separate ratings to different sections of the same source. For example, it rates The New York Times’ opinion section “Left” and its news section “Lean Left.” AllSides also incorporates reader feedback into its system. People can mark that they agree or disagree with AllSides’ rating of a source. When a significant number of people disagree, AllSides often revisits a source to vet it once again, Mastrine said.

The AllSides chart generally gets good reviews, she said, and most people mark that they agree with the ratings. Still, she sees one misconception among the people that encounter it: They think center means better. Mastrine disagrees.

“The center outlets might be omitting certain stories that are important to people. They might not even be accurate,” she said. “We tell people to read across the spectrum.”

To make that easier, AllSides offers a curated “ balanced news feed ,” featuring articles from across the political spectrum, on its website.

AllSides makes money through paid memberships, one-time donations, media literacy training and online advertisements. It plans to become a public benefit corporation by the end of the year, she added, meaning it will operate both for profit and for a stated public mission.

The Ad Fontes chart

(Courtesy: Ad Fontes)

The Ad Fontes chart rates both reliability and political bias. It scores news sources — around 270 now, and an expected 300 in December — using bias and reliability as coordinates on its chart.

The outlets appear on a spectrum, with seven markers showing a range from “Most Extreme Left” to “Most Extreme Right” along the bias axis, and eight markers showing a range from “Original Fact Reporting” to “Contains Inaccurate/Fabricated Info” along the reliability axis.

The chart is a departure from its first version, back when founder Vanessa Otero , a patent attorney, said she put together a chart by herself as a hobby after seeing Facebook friends fight over the legitimacy of sources during the 2016 election. Otero said that when she saw how popular her chart was, she decided to make bias ratings her full-time job and founded Ad Fontes — Latin for “to the source” — in 2018.

“There were so many thousands of people reaching out to me on the internet about this,” she said. “Teachers were using it in their classrooms as a tool for teaching media literacy. Publishers wanted to publish it in textbooks.”

About 30 paid analysts rate articles for Ad Fontes. Listed on the company’s website , they represent a range of experience — current and former journalists, educators, librarians and similar professionals. The company recruits analysts through its email list and references and vets them through a traditional application process. Hired analysts are then trained by Otero and other Ad Fontes staff.

To start review sessions, a group of coordinators composed of senior analysts and the company’s nine staffers pulls articles from the sites being reviewed. They look for articles listed as most popular or displayed most prominently.

Part of the Ad Fontes analyst political bias test. The test asks analysts to rank their political bias on 18 different policy issues.

Ad Fontes administers an internal political bias test to analysts, asking them to rank their left-to-right position on about 20 policy positions. That information allows the company to attempt to create ideological balance by including one centrist, one left-leaning and one right-leaning analyst on each review panel. The panels review at least three articles for each source, but they may review as many as 30 for particularly prominent outlets, like The Washington Post, Otero said. More on their methodology, including how they choose which articles to review to create a bias rating, can be found here on the Ad Fontes website.

When they review the articles, the analysts see them as they appear online, “because that’s how people encounter all content. No one encounters content blind,” Otero said. The review process recently changed so that paired analysts discuss their ratings over video chat, where they are pushed to be more specific as they form ratings, Otero said.

Individual scores for an article’s accuracy, the use of fact or opinion, and the appropriateness of its headline and image combine to create a reliability score. The bias score is determined by the article’s degree of advocacy for a left-to-right political position, topic selection and omission, and use of language.

To create an overall bias and reliability score for an outlet, the individual scores for each reviewed article are averaged, with added importance given to more popular articles. That average determines where sources show up on the chart.

Ad Fontes details its ratings process in a white paper from August 2019.

While the company mostly reviews prominent legacy news sources and other popular news sites, Otero hopes to add more podcasts and video content to the chart in coming iterations. The chart already rates video news channel “ The Young Turks ” (which claims to be the most popular online news show with 250 million views per month and 5 million subscribers on YouTube ), and Otero mentioned she next wants to examine videos from Prager University (which claims 4 billion lifetime views for its content, has 2.84 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.4 million followers on Instagram ). Ad Fontes is working with ad agency Oxford Road and dental care company Quip to create ratings for the top 50 news and politics podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Otero said.

“It’s not strictly traditional news sources, because so much of the information that people use to make decisions in their lives is not exactly news,” Otero said.

She was shocked when academic textbook publishers first wanted to use her chart. Now she wants it to become a household tool.

“As we add more news sources on to it, as we add more data, I envision this becoming a standard framework for evaluating news on at least these two dimensions of reliability and bias,” she said.

She sees complaints about it from both ends of the political spectrum as proof that it works.

“A lot of people love it and a lot of people hate it,” Otero said. “A lot of people on the left will call us neoliberal shills, and then a bunch of people that are on the right are like, ‘Oh, you guys are a bunch of leftists yourselves.’”

The project has grown to include tools for teaching media literacy to school kids and an interactive version of the chart that displays each rated article. Otero’s company operates as a public benefit corporation with a stated public benefit mission: “to make news consumers smarter and news media better.” She didn’t want Ad Fontes to rely on donations.

“If we want to grow with a problem, we have to be a sustainable business. Otherwise, we’re just going to make a small difference in a corner of the problem,” she said.

Ad Fontes makes money by responding to specific research requests from advertisers, academics and other parties that want certain outlets to be reviewed. The company also receives non-deductible donations and operates on WeFunder , a grassroots crowdfunding investment site, to bring in investors. So far, Ad Fontes has raised $163,940 with 276 investors through the site.

Should you use the charts?

Media bias charts with transparent, rigorous methodologies can offer insight into sources’ biases. That insight can help you understand what perspectives sources bring as they share the news. That insight also might help you understand what perspectives you might be missing as a news consumer.

But use them with caution. Political bias isn’t the only thing news consumers should look out for. Reliability is critical, too, and the accuracy and editorial standards of organizations play an important role in sharing informative, useful news.

Media bias charts are a media literacy tool. They offer well-researched appraisals on the bias of certain sources. But to best inform yourself, you need a full toolbox. Check out Poynter’s MediaWise project for more media literacy tools.

This article was originally published on Dec. 14, 2020.

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Comments are closed.

We are too obsessed with alleged bias and objectivity, which so often is in the biased eye of the beholder. The main standard of good journalism should be verifiable factual accuracy.

Hoping to see a follow-up article about whether we can trust fact checker report card charts created by collecting a fact checker’s subjective ratings.

As a writer for Wonkette, I won’t claim to be objective, but we do like to point out that our rating at Ad Fontes – both farthest to the left and the least reliable, is absurd. Apparently we can’t be trusted at all because we do satirical commentary instead of straight news.

When we’ve attempted to point out to Ms. Otero that we adhere to high standards when it comes to factuality, but we also make jokes, she has replied that satire is inherently untrustworthy and biased, particularly since we sometimes use dirty words.

That seems to us a remarkably biased definition of bias.

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Readers and Online News Websites Research Paper

This paper will be a case study of News.com.au. The objective will be to use this site to explore some of the factors mentioned above. It will show that the success of online broadcasts relies on more than just the readers. The paper will also take into account the thoughts of the readers on their role in that success, and members of the site’s staff on the news and the new developments they wish to adopt.

We will write a custom Research Paper on Readers and Online News Websites specifically for you for only 9.35/page

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This will be done through a questionnaire. The paper will also explore the organization and structure of News.com.au website, and how this helps it sell itself to the readers.

Introduction

With the prevalence of online media today, more and more media houses are going online. Not only are new media houses adopting online broadcasting, but the ones that are already online are increasing their online portals. These media houses hope to retain their customers.

Their adoption of online media is an attempt to chase after their customers who are already on line, as well as winning new online users. The participation of readers is pivotal for the success of the sites (Cushion 2001; Cameron 2000).

Based on their perceptions on the sites, the readers could inform other people; their friends, families, workmates, et cetera. Although getting more people coming in is a good thing, the real question is not whether a person logs in, but whether he/she keeps returning to the portal. Retaining old customers makes it possible to identify the new readers, and to evaluate whether the portal is popular amongst readers (Emmerichs et al 2004).

News.com is an organization of editors based in Sydney. It has a large number of online editors who manage its work in many cities and mast-head sections all over the world (Burden 2008; Chappel 2000, p. 12). It has reporters and newspapers that contribute greatly in many states including territories all over Australia and goes further to include correspondents from different parts of the world (Chaston 1999, p. 34).

In Asia, it has correspondents from various cities that include Beijing in China, Bangkok in Thailand, Tokyo in Japan and Jakarta in Indonesia. In Europe, London takes the lion share and takes the representation of United Kingdom and the larger European continent. In the United States, the cities of Washington, Wellington, New York and Los Angeles have been inhabited by the correspondents of this organization (Chaston 1999, p. 30).

It has in the last decade drawn its global power of incorporating news and the act of gathering parallel news from News Limited. This is the largest new gathering network in Australia (De Botton 2002; Denu 2011).

Within its rank, is an out-and-about team of online reporters who work hard to contribute their daily reports to the millions of the Australian population (Little 2007, p. 41; Alysen 2002, p. 35).It presents the content it gathers from the vast network of the News Limited network which has in its ranks news on a range issues such as business, weather, entertainment, and sports.

The portal makes almost minute to minute update of its news. For example, it can be noticed that the Breaking News column in the News.com.au bears headlines only minutes apart (Young 2007).

It has a wide range of contributing factors in its daily to daily news that range from newspapers which include the daily telegraph, the advertiser, the Australian, the herald sun, the Sunday times, the courier mail and the mercury. The posting of the newspapers is done every night at around 2am.

The reporting teams give an update on the events that happen each and every-day, and get its daily update from its efficiently developed network of printing activities and the other resources of the associated press of Australia and other press resources like the Agence France-Presse and the associated press (Erdelez 1995).

Literature review

Print media thrive on readership. As has been briefly mentioned above, media houses count on readers to keep their sites running. Variety and the consequent competitiveness helped by the internet makes it necessary for these media houses to adopt suitable ways to attract and retain more readers.

For this reason, various media houses have adopted a number of audience-based tactics. Since the primary objective is to win and retain these customers, the news content, which is the primary product that these media houses are selling, becomes only a small part of the overall methods used to win readers (Valentine 2011, p. 65).

For instance, Bowman and Willis (2003, p. 7) pointed out how MSNBC.com, CNN, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal offered their readers certain degrees of personalization on their sites’ front pages. Personalization means that readers can customize the portals to satisfy some of their tastes.

Also another phenomenon of online activity is what Erdelez (1995, p. 20) referred to as information encountering. This is the ability of the internet to get readers to news without them really intending to. This thrives upon the opportunistic reading habits and emotional response of the readers.

Tewksbury et al. (2001, p. 34) argued that due to the prevalence of news online, many people come by news items without necessarily setting out to find the news. In the same line, Nguyen (2008) agrees that the structure of online media has facilitated unintended encounter of news and its reading.

What these examples reveal is that it is not only the place of readers to keep the get to the site. While the end target is humans, there are other elements of the internet that helps keep the sites running. The irony here is that people may not really go to the site for the purpose of reading the news, but maybe to reach a gateway to other portals.

But the fact still remains that they have gotten the readers to their site. Another Irony is that the very nature of internet structure that leads readers to these sites may be the same thing that directs them away. Nonetheless, the case of New.com.au shows clearly just how important readers are to keeping news website running.

News.com.au has also adopted a readers-centered tactic of retaining its readers. This has involved different forms of reader-participation. For instance, readers participate in the site by posting their comments on various issues on the company site.

These posts include the reader’s reaction(s) to various issues, including the news or certain new adoptions in the site-structure and organization, amongst others. This paper will show that this reader-centered tactic is having a positive effect on winning readers to their online portal.

As it were, this tactic has been a direct way to hear what the readers want from their own lips. The company has an online portal dedicated to collecting the readers’ views fro critical assessment and evaluation. It has constantly used the information from the readers to know what they perceive as negative and make necessary adjustments.

In other words, the company realizes and acknowledges the role of the readers in keeping their site running. Their primary goal then becomes satisfying the readers (Goggin 2001, p. 44).

It is as if the company has explicitly set out to answer a question it has set itself: How do we expect to have the most captivating news when the readers do not have the right platforms to express themselves and air their satisfactions or dissatisfactions?

A good media house cannot emerge without the resurgent action of its readers, so the readers ought to be given the chance to help the media houses online make the right decisions and changes (Heracleous, Wirtz & Pangarkar 2006; Berridge 2007).

Research Questions

The research seeks to answer the question like; how has the general setting of the online portal of the News.com.au helped it win and keep readers? And what other new tactics should the company adopt to ensure that it retains a close relation with its readers?

Methodology

The research made use of multiple methods of data collection, including where experimentation, surveys, questionnaires and observation of the site to enhance the accuracy and reproducibility of the results, and to increase the likeliness of getting more results from other sources relating to online media organization, especially News.com.au (Karol & Nelson 2007).

Experimentation: the research emphasized on studying the trend of relations between the readers and the organization.

For instance, the number of readers who have visited their websites of the organization, what kinds of comments the readers have made: positive or negative, and how these comments have influenced certain changes in the site, and the company’s general operations. The decisions of the managers and the readers’ involvement in online media were used for the experimentation (Gillespie, Jeannette & Hennessey 2010).

Some of the data was obtained from the company’s history from the company website sites. Other data that was gotten from the company website including the recent activities of the company and what the managers have done to deal with the pressure of the increasing online readership and how they have reacted to the different comments.

The correspondence between the company and the readers on the company website was equally witnessed. Moreover, more data was gotten from the company’s history, its position on online reading and the effects it has had on the general online media broadcasts from other secondary results like journals and magazines (Atwood 2007; Cohen 2011).

Questionnaires were used to interview specific groups of people over the internet. The different questions that were required for the research were composed and sent to the News Limited office in Australia via email. In this case, the researcher identified the target group from the players within this organization.

Since these persons were located in various places around Australia, the internet was the only effective means of communicating with them. Questionnaires were developed on word format and sent to the identified study group, which included the managers and the executive chairman of the organization who had been consulted before the study. As already stated, the questionnaires were sent over through email.

The results were received back from these persons by the same means. This study identified 40 potential interviewees who signed consent forms, received the questionnaire over the net, but only 35 of them returned the questionnaires. Out of the 35 returned questionnaires, 2 were found ineligible for the study. In the end, only 33 of the of the study sample were eligible for the study (MacGinley 2004; Erdley & Kesterson 2002).

The annual reports released by News.com Australian media for the last five years shows their performances regarding the number of online readers who visited its online portal. I obtained permission to study the data from the organization which had been identified as the study center and place.

The researcher sought for permission from the managers and the various stakeholders of the organization. The executive chairman was the main person contacted with a request to allow an explicit study on his organization on their activities and everything revolving around their reader-data collection methods. The permission was granted.

These study populations formed the first study section, where the causes of the divergent opinions and comments in the online Medias were determined. These study populations were considered for the qualitative research, given that the study was both quantitative and qualitative. For the quantitative research, the researcher sent questionnaires to the main organization offices in Australia.

Because all the study populations identified in this research understood and used English, the questionnaires were in English language. The researcher obtained important financial aid from the professionals working at the News.com.au branch in the region.

The study targeted the organization, which, it felt, was the best in Australia- being the major media house in Australia (Kenyon 2008; Austin 2010). The data was not tampered with in for one month that data collection was carried out.

The qualitative data was cumulated in individual’s interviews and then documented. For the Quantitative data, the questionnaires were gathered by the researcher and distributed through email to the staff of News.com.au. Responses were collected via the email (Bunzel 2000; Karol & Nelson 2007).

Data analysis

Statistical data analysis tools and procedures were used to derive information from the data obtained in the questionnaires. Specifically, the Statistical Packages software as well as the Microsoft access and database tools was used for the study. The data analysis procedure was done within a period of one week which was well within the stipulated time (Donald & Keane 2002; Bowman & Willis 2003).

The questionnaires were responded to according to the instructions given. On analyzing the questionnaires, it was revealed that there were several positive questions for the researched organization. The organization conveyed that there was an average of more than 5% difference between the comments and the opinions which the online readers gave out in 2009.

The difference rose by 6 percent in 2010.

The organization further reported that they had a negative difference when handling readers from other countries who had read and sampled its news portal, mainly because it was not so enriched in terms of experience compared to other well established media sites in Australia like the News Limited which has acted as an all-time leading online portal in the past decade (Newton & Morrison 2007, p. 45).

Most readers preferred other up to date and the emerging news precisely the political news.

Study results

The research found out that the organization had taken into key consideration the increased feedbacks and the opinions that it received from its daily readers through their portal. As the managers explained in their questionnaires, this had impacted greatly on the company positively since they were able to receive prompt feedbacks when an error occurred in their site.

For instance, whenever their broadcast is not streaming properly, they have learnt it from the readers and used the information to avert and counter the problem promptly. And by observing the website and witnessing the correspondence between the readers and the site staff, it was noticed that the handlers of the portal responded promptly to the readers’ questions and comments (Berridge 2007; Bretford 2010).

After the end of research on the organization and the readers’ participation on online media, it can be concluded that each and every media that feeds news to the people through an online platform should instill efficient platforms where readers’ can air and interact directly with the organization, for example, the help-platform in the organization’s website.

The use of online feeds will give the readers a one-on-one platform to air their opinions: satisfactions and dissatisfactions, and their views on various pieces of information.

For an efficient growth of the online Media, the readers should be allowed to be involved in the day to day running of the organization. The research also found out that news.com had involved their online readers a lot and this had been a major help to their immense growth in the past decade (Young 2007).

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Literary Review

The current issue, march 2012 issue - out now.

In This Issue: John Gray on Tony Judt’s Thinking the Twentieth Century • Elaine Showalter on the first Pop Age • Donald Rayfield on Belarus • Praveen Swami on Sharia law • A C Grayling: What are Universities For? • The Letters of Joseph Roth • Jane Ridley on the Queen • Seamus Perry on the poetry of translation • Jonathan Fenby on Mao • Richard Holloway on religion for atheists • John Sutherland on growing old • Frances Wilson on cruelty and laughter and much, much more…

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‘This magazine is flush with tight, smart writing.’ Washington Post

Literary Review covers the most important and interesting books published each month, from history and biography to fiction and travel. The magazine was founded in 1979 and is based in London.

Highlights from the Current Issue

June 2023, Issue 519 Munro Price on the trial of Marshal Pétain * Daisy Dunn on Plato * Barney Ronay on sport and the 1980s * Tim Stanley on Martin Luther King * David Dwan on George Orwell * Richard V Reeves on the decline of elites * Ben Gummer on vaccines * Jenni Nuttall on words and gender * Lucy Moore on ballet * David Abulafia on the Sahara * Robert Colls on Polly Toynbee * Nicholas Vincent on Henry III * David Gelber on abolishing the monarchy * Bryan Karetnyk on Korean short stories * Sarah Crown on Lorrie Moore * Gill Partington on movable books * and much, much more…

Munro Price

France on trial: the case of marshal pétain, by julian jackson.

On 23 July 1945 the 89-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, until recently head of the French state, went on trial for his life before a specially convened High Court in Paris, accused of attacking national security and collusion with Nazi Germany amounting to treason. For four years, from the fall of France to the liberation, he had steered the Vichy regime created from the wreckage of defeat into collaboration with the new continental hegemon, Adolf Hitler. Now, after eight months of wandering to escape the advancing Allies through eastern France to the castle of Sigmaringen in Germany and finally to Switzerland, he was in the custody of General de Gaulle’s provisional government. Pétain’s trial was about much more than the fate of one extremely elderly man. It was newly liberated... read more

Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy

By robin waterfield.

Contrary to many people’s perception of him, Plato did not spend his entire life listening to Socrates philosophising in colonnades in Athens or writing dialogues meandering through complex ideas. He was once captured in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and put up for sale in a slave market. The reason we seldom hear about this is the same reason there hasn’t been a stand-alone biography of Plato in English in nearly 200 years. The sources for his life are untrustworthy and fiendishly difficult to interpret... read more

The enslavement allegedly occurred while Plato was travelling home from Sicily in 384 BC. A number of ancient biographers claim that the philosopher boarded a ship with a Spartan who enslaved him on the orders of the tyrant of Syracuse, but Plato’s new biographer, Robin Waterfield, suggests it’s more likely that he was on board a merchant ship which caught the eye of pirates. The seas were full of marauders in this period and it is entirely possible that Plato sailed into treacherous waters. His luck changed after he was spotted in the market by an admirer who agreed to pay a ransom to secure his release.

Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations

By simon schama.

I was left wondering after a moment of peak Simon Schama – where we are led from his ‘idle’ purchase in Paris of a slim old book on Marcel Proust’s father, Adrien, to his own bookshelves by the Hudson River – whether great historians must have something close to a Proustian affinity for a particular period of history, one they understand not simply as a result of study but which they inhabit emotionally, with a quality not far separated from a kind of memory. The reason why the dim fog of mid-medieval western Europe was cleared by Richard Southern is because he understood that world at an elemental level and could translate that understanding to the reader. The same is true when it comes to Steven Runciman writing on Crusade-torn Byzantium, Eamon Duffy on England on the eve of the Reformation and David Brading on early colonial Latin America.

For Schama, it is the Enlightenment beau monde. When he introduces the japes and exploits of Charles-Marie de La Condamine – ‘ex-soldier, scientific virtuoso, mathematician, intercontinental voyager and traveller and in every respect one of the more swaggeringly outsize figures of eighteenth-century culture’ – it is hard to escape the sense that Schama is talking with him, not just about him, or at least recalling a conversation they enjoyed late last night, half-cut. La Condamine, a friend of Voltaire, became an outspoken champion of smallpox inoculation in 18th-century France. Schama the Encyclopédiste takes us round the salons frequented by La Condamine with an intellectual swagger of his own, and with some justice: he is far better suited to an age that prized the parry and thrust of adorned debate to one in which grey sermonising passes for public argument.

Barney Ronay

Everybody wants to rule the world: britain, sport & the 1980s, by roger domeneghetti.

Did you know that during the siege of the Iranian embassy, one of the great British televisual events of the 20th century, the BBC cut between live footage of the SAS storming the building and live coverage of Alex Higgins and Cliff Thorburn’s fags-and-booze-sponsored 1980 World Snooker Championship final at the Crucible Theatre (thereby enabling commentator Ted Lowe’s pant-wettingly good, once-in-a-lifetime line: ‘And now from one... read more

Did you know that after Seb Coe lost to Steve Ovett in the 800-metres final at the Moscow Olympics, Coe’s father sidled up to his son at the post-race press conference and announced, loud enough for journalists to hear, ‘you ran like a cunt’?

Did you know (and there are just so many did-you-knows in this book) that when John Curry appeared at the 1976 Sports Journalists’ Association dinner, which took place just before Christmas, to be honoured for his figure-skating gold medal, he was introduced with the words ‘Here comes the fairy for the tree’? Or that Curry was then defended by the comedian Eric Morecambe, who shouted out, ‘Disgraceful!’ – an incident that, just when you thought it wasn’t possible to love Eric Morecambe any more, confirms that it is?

Travellers to Unimaginable Lands: Dementia, Carers and the Hidden Workings of the Mind

By dasha kiper.

Around the time that Lionel Messi was slotting home his first goal in the 2022 World Cup final, my mother was taking her last breath. The news reached me at half-time. The previous day, my brother and I had been at her bedside. Death was overdue, but there was an inexplicable delay in delivering the end-of-life meds and it was distressing to witness the woman who had brought us into the world making her way out of it in a state of agitated bewilderment. Words had deserted her. Thoughts and memories had been falling through the holes in her brain for some time, so perhaps she was all but drained of coherent cognition in the last days. It had been, I think, about eighteen months since she had last truly recognised me, though she concealed it well. Close to the end, her eyes had a pleading look. In the dying embers of her consciousness, I sensed there was still someone behind those eyes, someone reduced to a core of discomfort and confusion, but still, it seemed, someone . What can one do in such circumstances but hold the person’s hand and utter soothing words, regardless of whether they register?

Signs of dementia had begun to appear about seven years ago, not long after my father died, but I wasn’t the first to spot them. It seems ludicrous now that I reflect on it. After all, I’d done research into the neurochemical bases of memory loss in Alzheimer’s and diagnostic assessments of dementia were a routine part of my work in clinical neuropsychology. Yet, there I was, blind to my own mother’s incipient dementia.

Bryan Karetnyk

The penguin book of korean short stories, by bruce fulton (ed).

In his penetrating and deeply personal introduction to the much-anticipated Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories, the Korean-born literary critic Kwon Youngmin recounts a formative episode from his youth. While a graduate student in Seoul in the 1970s, he witnessed a striking exchange. A visiting professor from Japan, he writes, ‘asked our professors how many authors of fiction we had in Korea and how many fictional works had been published since the turn of the century’. So faltering was... read more

In his penetrating and deeply personal introduction to the much-anticipated Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories , the Korean-born literary critic Kwon Youngmin recounts a formative episode from his youth. While a graduate student in Seoul in the 1970s, he witnessed a striking exchange. A visiting professor from Japan, he writes, ‘asked our professors how many authors of fiction we had in Korea and how many fictional works had been published since the turn of the century’. So faltering was their answer that the young Kwon had to ‘sneak out of the room in shame, [his] face burning’.

The exchange was not only indicative, but symbolic. Sos ŏ l , or ‘fiction’ in the Western mould, arrived in Korea at the start of the 20th century, along with Japanese colonial rule, and the story of its development is one inextricably linked to political events. Indeed, it is extraordinary to think that by the time this Japanese professor asked his patronising question, only a single generation of modern Korean writers had received formal education in their own language (as Kwon points out, education during the colonial period was mandatorily delivered in Japanese, while those lucky enough to receive a literary education prior to that were instructed in hanmun , or classical Chinese).

“Easily the best book magazine currently available” John Carey

From the Archives

From the june 2002 issue, a c grayling, our posthuman future, by francis fukuyama, redesigning humans, by gregory stock.

From the July 1999 issue

View from the summit, by sir edmund hillary.

From the August 1984 issue

Peter ronnov-jessen, interview with j g ballard.

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Looking Backward

Selections from the TLR Archive

An International Journal of Contemporary Writing

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Poetry Wonder

Of a cold country.

Isabel Nathaniel

Across the room you stand in torchfire, early king of cold country. You drink wine. Your smile is a thin refusal.

I made you out of lies and colors. I learned your face before then formed it.

I named you and told you your life in carved ivory.

You consented, you helped, you enjoyed the array.

I mean you to live in a drowned forest At the bottom of a lake. I meant you to inhabit me and shine out.

I lean to see you, profiled away, wrong to the light. There is the sound of silk

as I veer-let go strung sense.

You are a space:

the white desolation of a glare of sun.

Isabel Nathaniel is a prize-winning poet born and brought up in New York City. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines, including Poetry , The Nation , Field , Ploughshares , and Prairie Schooner . Among her many honors are a Disc overy/The Nation Prize and the Robert H. Winner Award, Gertrude B. Claytor Award, and two Cecil Hemley Awards from the Poetry Society of America. Her collection, The Dominion of Lights received the 1996 Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best Book of Poetry.

Review of Dartmoor site management announced

Published 15 hours ago

A review of the way protected sites on Dartmoor are managed has been announced by the government.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has appointed David Fursman as chair.

The review panel will "work with local farmers and stakeholders... to provide an independent perspective on the management of the protected sites".

Natural England said a joint approach needed to be "based on a shared understanding of the evidence".

Mr Fursdon said he was "delighted" to be chairing the review.

He is Lord Lieutenant of Devon, and a landowner, along with being chair of the institute for agricultural and horticulture.

A Defra statement said: "The government is committed to supporting farmers and those living and working on the moor to join together to safeguard the long term management of the moors, in particular the areas with greatest environmental value."

The review will work with farmers and stakeholders and look at the ways Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) across Dartmoor are managed ecologically.

It will make recommendations "as to the most effective grazing and management regime(s) that would deliver improvements on the SSSI sites across Dartmoor so they can maintain or achieve favourable condition whilst also balancing the long-term and sustainable delivery of other priorities such as agricultural production, public access and cultural and natural heritage".

Farming Minister Mark Spencer said: "The review will help us identify how we can deliver much-needed environmental improvements on Dartmoor while supporting other priorities such as agricultural production, public access and cultural and natural heritage."

The review will be completed in the autumn.

Mr Fursdon said: "I am delighted to be chairing this independent review and I look forward to fully engaging with all stakeholders involved in the management of Dartmoor."

Dave Slater, South West regional director for Natural England, said: "Our long term joint approach with Dartmoor farmers to protect and enhance these habitats needs to be based on a shared understanding of the evidence that will inform how we can have a future where nature and farming can thrive together."

Follow BBC News South West on Twitter , Facebook and Instagram . Send your story ideas to [email protected].

കേരളത്തിന്റെ പ്രിയപ്പെട്ട ഉമ്മൻചാണ്ടി

മനോരമ ലേഖിക June 09, 2023 04:18 PM IST

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പൊതുജീവിതം നയിക്കുക എന്നാൽ അത്ര എളുപ്പമുള്ള കാര്യമല്ല. ഒരു പൊതുപ്രവർത്തകന്റെ ജീവിതത്തിൽ അയാളെ കാത്തിരിക്കുന്നത് പ്രതിസന്ധികളാണ്. വ്യക്തിപരമായ കാര്യങ്ങൾക്കായി നീക്കി വയ്ക്കുവാൻ സമയമോ സാഹചര്യമോ ഉണ്ടാകില്ല. അത് അറിഞ്ഞുകൊണ്ട് തന്നെ ആ രംഗത്തേക്ക് ഇറങ്ങുകയും തന്റെ കാര്യക്ഷമമായ പ്രവർത്തനശൈലി കൊണ്ട് പതിറ്റാണ്ടുകൾ ജനമനസ്സിൽ സ്ഥാനം പിടിക്കുകയും ചെയ്ത നേതാക്കളിൽ പ്രമുഖനാണ് ഉമ്മൻ ചാണ്ടി.

ഇന്ത്യയിൽ എവിടെയാണെങ്കിലും ഞായറാഴ്ച ദിവസം വീട്ടിലേക്ക് ഓടിയെത്തി രാവിലെ പ്രാർത്ഥനയിൽ പങ്കെടുക്കും. ശേഷം കാണുവാൻ കാത്തുനിൽക്കുന്ന ആളുകളെ കണ്ട് വേണ്ടത് ചെയ്യുന്ന ഉമ്മൻ ചാണ്ടി, ഏറ്റവും കൂടുതൽ തവണ ഒരേ മണ്ഡലത്തിൽ നിന്നു മത്സരിച്ചു ജയിച്ച നേതാവാണ്. ഒരു നാടിന്റെ എല്ലാമെല്ലാമായി ജീവിക്കുകയും അവിടുത്തെ സാധാരണക്കാരുടെ വീട്ടിലെ വിശേഷങ്ങൾക്ക് പോലും പങ്കാളിയാവുകയും ചെയ്തു .

എസ് ബി കോളേജിൽ നിന്നും ബി ഇക്കണോമിക്സും എറണാകുളം ലോ കോളജിൽ നിന്ന് എൽഎൽബിയും നേടി രാഷ്ട്രീയജീവിതം ആരംഭിച്ച ഉമ്മൻചാണ്ടിയെ കുറിച്ച് പ്രതിപാദിക്കുന്ന പി.ടി ചാക്കോ, ഡോ. സി.സി. തോമസ് എന്നിവർ ചേർന്ന് രചിച്ചിരിക്കുന്ന പുസ്തകമാണ് എ ഗ്രേഷ്യസ് വോയിസ്. മൂന്നു ഭാഗങ്ങളായി തിരിച്ച പുസ്തകത്തിന് ഏഴ് അധ്യായങ്ങളാണ് ഉള്ളത്. ആദ്യഭാഗം ഉമ്മൻചാണ്ടി എന്ന നേതാവിന്റെ പ്രതിപക്ഷ നേതാവ്, മുഖ്യമന്ത്രി എന്ന നിലയിലെ ഔദ്യോഗിക ജീവിതവും രാഷ്ട്രീയ ഇടപെടലുകളും തുറന്നുകാട്ടുന്നു.

തന്നോട് പറയുവാനായി പരാതികളുമായി നിൽക്കുന്ന മനുഷ്യരെ ആരെയും നിരാശയോടെ മടക്കി അയക്കാത്ത നേതാവ്. അതിനിടയിൽ കർത്തവ്യങ്ങൾക്ക് മുടങ്ങാതെ ശ്രദ്ധ കൊടുക്കുന്നയാൾ. പലപ്പോഴും കൃത്യസമയത്ത് ഭക്ഷണം പോലും ഇല്ല. മുഖ്യമന്ത്രിയായിരുന്ന സമയം വെളുപ്പിന് 2 മണി വരെ ഔദ്യോഗിക കാര്യങ്ങൾക്കായി മാറ്റിവെച്ചു. ഓഫിസിൽ നിന്നു എത്ര താമസിച്ച് ഇറങ്ങിയാലും രാവിലെ ആറുമണിക്കു തന്നെ ഉണരും. എട്ടു മണിയാവുമ്പോൾ ഓഫീസിൽ എത്തും. വിശ്രമമില്ലാത്ത ദിവസങ്ങളും ഉറക്കമില്ലാത്ത രാത്രികളും കേരളത്തിനായി സമർപ്പിച്ച ചാണ്ടിയുടെ നിരീക്ഷണപാടവവും പ്രവർത്തന സന്നദ്ധതയും നമുക്കിവിടെ മനസ്സിലാക്കാം. കേരളത്തിലെ ഐടി മേഖലയുടെ വളർച്ചയ്ക്ക് ഉമ്മൻചാണ്ടി എടുത്ത് നിലപാടുകൾ വളരെ ശ്രദ്ധേയമാണ്. സ്മാർട്ട് സിറ്റി പദ്ധതി നിരവധി എതിർപ്പുകൾക്കിടയിലും നടപ്പിലാക്കിയ അദ്ദേഹത്തിന്റെ ദീർഘവീക്ഷണവും പ്രശംസനീയം. പ്രതിപക്ഷ നേതാവ് എന്ന നിലയിൽ നിന്നുകൊണ്ട് ഇടപെട്ട ലാവ്‌ലിൻ കേസ്, വിഴിഞ്ഞം കേസ്, ലോട്ടറി മാഫിയ കേസ്, മൂന്നാർ ഭൂമാഫിയ കേസ്, ശബരിമല കേസ് എന്നിങ്ങനെ വിവിധ വിഷയങ്ങൾ ഈ പുസ്തകത്തിൽ പ്രതിപാദിക്കുന്നു.

രണ്ടാം ഭാഗം ഭൂതകാലത്തിലേക്കാണ് സഞ്ചരിക്കുന്നത്. ഒരു യുവനേതാവ് എന്നതിൽ നിന്ന് കേരളത്തിന്റെ ഏറ്റവും പ്രധാനപ്പെട്ട നേതാക്കളിൽ ഒരാൾ എന്ന നിലയിലേക്കുള്ള വളർച്ചയെ സൂചിപ്പിക്കുന്നു ഈ ഭാഗം. കെഎസ്‌യു നേതാവ്, ട്രേഡ് യൂണിയൻ നേതാവ്, എംഎൽഎ, യുഡിഎഫ് കൺവീനർ, മന്ത്രി പദം എന്നിങ്ങനെ അദ്ദേഹം വഹിച്ച വിവിധ പദവികളെ കുറിച്ച് ഈ ഭാഗം പ്രതിപാദിക്കുന്നു. മൂന്നാം ഭാഗം പുതുപ്പള്ളി എന്ന തന്റെ സ്വന്തം നാടിന്റെയും നാട്ടുകാരുടെയും ഇടയിലുള്ള അദ്ദേഹത്തിന്റെ സ്വകാര്യ ജീവിതത്തെ കുറിച്ചാണ്. ഉമ്മൻചാണ്ടിയുടെ കുടുംബത്തെക്കുറിച്ചും അടുത്ത ബന്ധങ്ങളെക്കുറിച്ചും ഇവിടെ നമുക്ക് കാണാം.

കുറഞ്ഞ പേജുകളിൽ ഉമ്മൻചാണ്ടി എന്ന രാഷ്ട്രീയ നേതാവിനെ കുറിച്ച് വ്യക്തമായ ഒരു ധാരണയാണ് നമുക്ക് ഈ പുസ്തകം നൽകുന്നത്.

Content Summary: Book A Gracious Voice Written by P. T. Chacko and Dr C. C Thomas

English Literature
Oommen Chandy

ഇവിടെയാണ് വന്ദേഭാരത് പിറക്കുന്നത്

‘ശിവരാജൻ കമ്മിഷൻ പോയത് പ്രതികൾ തെളിച്ച വഴിയേ’

International edition
Australia edition

A screengrab of a since taken down website that was advertising ‘Trump Bucks’ to some of the former president’s most ardent supporters.

‘Trump Bucks’ websites taken down after buyers fall for fake currency

Victims of con invested thousands of dollars in fake bills plastered with Trump’s face they believed would make them rich

Websites launched by companies selling “Trump Bucks” to some of the former president’s most ardent supporters have been taken down.

NBC reported the closures, after its investigation found several Colorado-based companies were behind the scam that promised investors they would get rich if the disgraced former president is re-elected in 2024.

Purchased in the form of coins, checks and cards, as part of a “Trump Rebate Banking System”, Trump Bucks were sold as a potentially highly valuable tender that would be made legal when Trump returned to power.

Advertisements on social media were sophisticated, using AI-generated narration and celebrity endorsements eventually revealed to be fake.

Victims of the con invested thousands of dollars in the fake currency plastered with Trump’s face. One man told NBC he invested $2,200 in Trump Bucks and other merchandise, only to find the Trump Bucks were useless when he tried to cash them in at a bank.

A Bank of America spokesperson told NBC it was difficult to assess how many people had tried to cash in Trump Bucks.

The online retailer ClickBank said it had disabled websites selling the products.

“Any consumer purchasing these items through ClickBank received a pre-purchase disclosure that they are for commemorative value only and are not legal tender,” a spokesperson said.

“Still, ClickBank is concerned to hear that the products were being deceptive marketed elsewhere so we chose to discontinue sales even with our disclaimer.”

Following a Freedom of Information Act request from NBC, the Federal Trade Commission confirmed at least one fraud complaint against Patriots Dynasty, one of the companies behind the scheme, alongside Patriots Future and USA Patriots.

The Better Business Bureau , a non-profit which informs US consumers, gave the companies an F or failing rating.

No criminal complaints had been filed, NBC said.

NBC quoted John Amann, the 77-year-old who spent more than $2,000 on Trump Bucks and other merchandise, as saying: “Now I’m questioning whether [Trump] is aware of this.”

The Trump re-election campaign did not comment.

Donald Trump

Roger Waters in fightback mode at London’s O2 Arena — review

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International Edition

CNN values your feedback

A utah school district removed the bible from some school libraries. now it’s received a request to review the book of mormon.

Davis School District in Farmington, Utah, has received a request to review the Book of Mormon for inappropriate content shortly after it removed the King James Bible from its elementary and middle school libraries.

A Utah school district that recently pulled the King James Bible from elementary and middle school libraries has now received a request to review the Book of Mormon for removal, according to school officials.

Christopher Williams, director of communications and operations at the Davis School District, said the district received a request Friday to review the Book of Mormon for “sensitive material” as well. The Book of Mormon is the religious text used in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported the request calls for the book to be reviewed because it contains violence, including battles, beheadings, and kidnappings.

A classroom sits empty as students take a break for lunch on Tuesday, May 24, 2022, at an elementary school in Iowa.

New Iowa law restricts gender identity education, bans books with sexual content

Williams told CNN he has not seen the request and does not know the grounds on which it was made.

“There have been no other requests made regarding other religious texts,” Williams said. “The district will treat this request just like any other request and will follow the policy as outlined” on school library media centers.

The request to review the Book of Mormon comes after the district announced they would remove the King James edition of the Bible from the district’s elementary and middle school libraries because of “vulgarity or violence.”

“The committee decided to retain the book in school library circulation only at the high school level based on age appropriateness due to vulgarity or violence,” he wrote in an email.

Williams told CNN he estimated seven or eight elementary schools and middle schools had the Bible in their libraries before the decision.

He said the school district is attempting to follow House Bill 374 , a 2022 law which “prohibits certain sensitive instructional materials in public schools” and requires a “local education agency to include parents who are reflective of a school’s community when determining whether an instructional material is sensitive material.” The text of the law defines “sensitive material” as “instructional material that is pornographic or indecent material.”

More than a dozen book bans restrict students access to

About a third of book bans reported in fall 2022 were a result of new state laws, free speech group says

The original request to review the King James Bible came from a person critiquing the “bad faith process” for reviewing books, according to CNN affiliate KUTV.

“Now we can all ban books and you don’t even need to read them or be accurate about it,” wrote the person in the anonymous request. “Heck, you don’t even need to see the book.”

Corinne Johnson, public relations director at Utah Parents United, a nonprofit which advocated for the 2022 Utah law, told CNN “the parent who challenged the Bible was clearly doing so in an attempt to undermine parents who are working diligently to protect children from addictive pornographic stimulants.”

Williams explained the school district has a process allowing certain individuals, including parents, students and district employees, to request books in school libraries be reviewed for inappropriate material. The “Sensitive Materials Review Committee” consists of a facilitator, at least one administrator working at a district school, a licensed teacher at a district school, a librarian at a district school, and a minimum of four parents with students enrolled at a district school.

A list of sensitive material review requests on the Davis school district website shows the district received a request to review the King James Bible on December 11 and completed the review on May 22. They made the decision to keep the book available in the high school library because they determined the book “does not contain sensitive material” as defined under Utah law. The Book of Mormon does not yet appear under the sensitive materials list on the school’s website.

The school received a request to appeal the Bible decision on May 31, according to the website. Williams told CNN the Bible will now go to an appeals committee of three members of the Davis School District Board of Education. The appeals committee will make a recommendation to the full Board of Education about keeping or removing the book in schools, and the board will make the final decision.

The Davis School District has 73,993 students enrolled in 92 district schools serving students from pre-K to 12th grade, according to its website. The school district is located in Farmington, around 17 miles from Salt Lake City.

CNN has requested a copy of the requests for removal for both the Bible and the Book of Mormon from the school district.

Several states have passed laws to restrict access to books in school libraries

The Davis School District’s requests to review the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon come as a number of states have implemented new laws driving book bans, according to advocates and library officials.

An April report from free speech organization PEN America found book bans rose throughout the 2022-2023 school year. Almost a third of the bans were the result of newly enacted state laws, according to the report.

The report found book bans were most prevalent in five states: Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina.

A Florida school district has faced lawsuits over its removal of books focused on race and LGBTQ+ issues. And in May, Iowa signed its own bill into law which bans books with sexual content from school libraries and stipulates the libraries can only carry “age-appropriate” books.

Utah Library Association president Patrick Hoecherl told CNN this year has seen an “increase in challenges” toward books in school libraries across Utah.

But he said most of the requests for removals or bans come from a small minority of parents, and do not reflect most parents’ attitudes.

“Really, most parents strongly oppose pulling books from school library shelves,” he said. “They trust their local librarians and teachers over government officials to work with parents locally to make decisions on what books are appropriate for kids.”

Hoecherl cited the 2022 American Family Survey, conducted by Deseret News and the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University. The study found just 12% of respondents agreed books should be removed from libraries if a parent objects, and only 16% believed public school libraries include inappropriate books on their shelves.

He added although the Utah law only specifically prohibits sexual content, in practice, it has mostly been used to target books discussing LGBTQ+ issues and race.

“That’s concerning to us because we know that pulling books based on topic or viewpoint is a clear violation of the First Amendment,” he said.

Hoecherl said the Davis district’s decision to remove the Bible from elementary and middle school libraries was “disappointing.”

“As librarians we want to be providing access to kids,” he said. “It’s important to us that kids have a variety of different viewpoints that are available to them so that they can understand their world and learn about these great works of literature.”

Week in Review

Asian equities were mixed but mostly higher for the week on hopes for a US Fed pause at the upcoming meeting as Hong Kong and Japan outperformed while Mainland China was slightly lower on the week.
The Caixin Services PMI was released on Monday, indicating above-expectations expansion in the services sector with a reading of 57.1.
China’s accommodative monetary policy was on display this week as the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), China’s central bank, lowered the rate that banks must pay on their deposits, freeing up more capital for lending and setting the stage for another reserve requirement cut.
News surfaced on Tuesday that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken may travel to China as soon as next week, another green shoot for US-China relations.

Friday’s Key News

Asian equities were mostly higher overnight except for Thailand, India, and the Philippines. It was a quiet night on the news front.

Internet names were slightly higher in Hong Kong overnight. Meanwhile, we saw short volume fall again after a rise last week. E-Commerce earnings have been stellar, which is contributing to the slow comeback in the names. Shorts are getting squeezed by better-than-expected results, especially from Trip.com on the recovery of travel in China.

Electric vehicle manufacturer Xpeng’s stock gained +5% in Hong Kong overnight as pre-sales began for its G6 smart coupe. The model debuted at the Shanghai Auto Show earlier in the year. Other EV names including NIO were mostly flat.

China's consumer prices rose a measly +0.2% year-over-year in May, a strong indication that more easing is on the way.

The State Council released its 2023 Legislative Work Plan this week, which includes national level regulations for the generative artificial intelligence (AI) industry. In other AI news, ByteDance, owner of TikTok, may roll out its own AI chat bot service.

Trump Indictment: McCarthy, DeSantis, Musk Blast DOJ Charges As Some Democrats Applaud

2024 lexus gx550 takes aim at land rover defender, what crimes was trump charged with in federal documents case here’s what we know—and how much prison time he could face.

Liquor giant Kweichow Moutai has announced a product expansion into desserts and other non-alcoholic food and beverage options to gain more young fans of the brand. Interesting!

Real estate saw some profit taking after its impressive run over the past two weeks on anticipation of increased policy support. Some of the policies being discussed include the lowering of down payments in some areas to encourage sales.

The Hang Seng and Hang Seng TECH indexes closed higher by +0.47% and +1.03%, respectively, overnight on volume that increased +3% from yesterday. The top-performing sectors were Communication Services, Healthcare, and Energy. Meanwhile, Real Estate, Financials, and Consumer Staples were the worst-performing sectors. Mainland investors sold a net -$160 million worth of Hong Kong stocks last night via Southbound Stock Connect.

Shanghai, Shenzhen, and the STAR Board closed higher by +0.55%, +0.71%, and +2.53% overnight on volume that increased +15% from yesterday. The top-performing sectors were Communication Services, Utilities, and Information Technology. Meanwhile, Real Estate, Financials, and Consumer Staples were the worst performing sectors. Foreign investors sold a net -$183 million worth of Mainland stocks via Northbound Stock Connect.

Last Night's Performance

Country performance

Stock performance

Hong Kong Top 10

Last Night’s Exchange Rates, Prices, & Yields

CNY per USD 7.13 versus 7.11 yesterday
CNY per EUR 7.68 versus 7.67 yesterday
Yield on 1-Day Government Bond 1.34% versus 1.40% yesterday
Yield on 10-Year Government Bond 2.67% versus 2.68% yesterday
Yield on 10-Year China Development Bank Bond 2.82% versus 2.83% yesterday
Copper Price +0.74% overnight

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slovenščina

WTO appraises EU’s trade policy and practices

WTO Members started the fifteenth Trade Policy Review of the European Union in Geneva today, examining the EU’s trade policy and practices from the end of 2019 until the end of 2022.

The peer-review exercise is crucial to the WTO’s monitoring and transparency functions.

Addressing the WTO Membership this morning, the head of the EU’s trade department, Sabine Weyand, highlighted the EU’s steadfast commitment to openness and multilateralism amidst serious external shocks, rising trade tensions and uncertainty. She elaborated on the EU’s non-discriminatory and transparent response to the unprecedented environmental crisis through its Green Deal and climate policy, stressing the EU’s willingness to engage in dialogue with its trading partners on measures like its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) or its deforestation legislation.

Meanwhile, WTO Members praised the EU’s efforts to help reform the WTO’s rulemaking, deliberative, dispute settlement and monitoring functions.

The WTO deliberations, which run until 7 June, complement a written review process based a report made by the WTO Secretariat, a separate report made by the EU itself, and the EU’s answers to over 1,600 questions from WTO Members on topics including agriculture, the green transition, gender equality, digital issues and of course trade policy.

The Trade Policy Review (TPR) Mechanism is an open and in-depth examination of WTO Members’ trade policies and practices by their peers. Such transparency ensures Members’ accountability and promotes a smoother functioning of the multilateral trading system.

Since the 2016 reform of the TPR Mechanism, the four largest Members in terms of trade volume – namely the EU, US, Japan and China – are subject to a review every three years.

For more information

WTO report on the 15th EU Trade Policy Review: Full report | Executive summary

EU report on the 15th EU Trade Policy Review

Opening Statement by DG Trade Director-General Sabine Weyand at the EU’s TPR

Permanent Mission of the EU to the WTO

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