A Review of Misinformation Across Disciplines: Implication for Online Education

Abstract

Misinformation research has grown to become a critical topic in all disciplines. Since the expanding of online media, misinformation has been spreading rapidly across the globe through social media and other information systems. Paralleling the rise of academic interest in misinformation, is the emergence of online education scholarship. Interest in the online educational implications of misinformation and its impact attracts an increase in scholarship on misinformation. This article presents the results of a review of 1172 publications with “Misinformation” across disciplines and a subset of 174 misinformation literature in online education that were published between 2009 and 2021. This review answers three questions: (1) What is the overall distribution of publication activity with "misinformation" publications? (2) What methodologies have scholars used to investigate misinformation involving online education? (3) What have scholars reported about the results of studies involving misinformation in online education? The review reveals that various methodologies were used in literature focusing on misinformation online education with leading numbers of content analysis and quantitative studies. This systematic review is particularly relevant to those online educators in various disciplines who are interested in learning what scholars from their own academic disciplines are writing about misinformation.

Editorial: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Mis- and Disinformation Studies

“…These concerns about the effects of mis/disinformation have stimulated a vibrant research agenda with academics from a wide variety of disciplines focusing on the subject. This cross-disciplinary interest in the subject is arguably an artifact that makes misinformation distinctive as a research topic, with researchers in public health, psychology, and computer science, among others investigating the problem of mis/disinformation (Huang, 2021). This special issue on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Mis- and Disinformation Studies highlights some of this cross-disciplinary research.…”