Choosing and using multiple information sources: Some new findings and emergent issues

This commentary highlights important contributions of four empirical investigations of how people sort through the masses of information that are now available to them and find what they need to solve some problem or make some decision. These studies demonstrate the impact of differences among information sources and the role that these differences play in people's evaluations of sources and use of the information to make decisions. Future research needs to examine changes in judgments of source credibility and information relevance as people acquire more knowledge of a topic and learn more sophisticated strategies for using multiple sources. Future studies of instructional effects on searching, sourcing and integrating multiple sources will be most informative if they collect multiple measures of processing and use of information in decision making and problem solving.