A comprehensive guide to fish
Sourcing information
Glass bloodfin tetra
Introduction
Whether you are a novice fish keeper or you have
been in the hobby for decades there is always
something new to learn. But where can you find
reliable and accurate information?
Unfortunately the hobby is full of people who having
kept fish semi successfully for a few months think
that they know everything there is to know about
fish keeping and this plainly isn't the case. The
rise of the internet forum has given these self
appointed advisors an opportunity to speak out and
spread halve truths rumour and occasionally just
plain old rubbish based on nothing more than their
own intuition.
Forums use other forums for research so rumour and
myth very quickly become well established. This
state of affairs obviously helps no one, so what can
be done about it.
Sourcing reliable information
Scholarly articles:
Finding reliable and correct information takes time and no little effort. The best source of information are scholarly articles and papers written by an expert in that field.
Such articles and papers are generally not
written with the lay person in mind and they will
require some work to fully understand them and then
to try to explain them in more simple terms.
Obviously this isn't as easy as going to Google and
reposting the first couple of results which is
probably why so few do this.
When citing information from a scholarly article
that article should have a reference which links
back to the original work so that it can be checked
by others or even challenged by a conflicting
article.
News items
Are subjected to stringent editorial control and are generally very accurate when reporting facts. Again any work based on a news item should have a reference stating the source.
Books and journals
Are both subject to editorial control and where a certain standard has to be met. Although not always completely reliable because their information can be superseded over time. In general books and journals written by an established expert in that field are a good source of accurate information.
Self published sources
Anyone can publish anything. Using self published articles without any references and written by someone who isn't an established expert in the field should be treated as questionable and generally not a reliable source of information. If on the other hand the work is created by an expert and the subject is within their field of expertise then the information should be treated as completely reliable.
More myths and simply poor information is passed on in fish and aquarium related forums than almost any other source, mainly due to poor understanding of the subject. Such forums simply use other forums for backing up their position, there is no substitute for real knowledge and expert sources both of which are readily available if people would just take the time to look properly.
Always cite your source
Don't try to fool people in to thinking that the work is your own, a few simple checks will reveal the real source. If you make a statement that "Most experts agree" then a source should be provided to back this up or the statement is worthless the same applies to saying "scientific studies show" put the link in or don't state it..