Reading student reports I often get side-tracked into closer looks at their sources. Not conducive for quick grading, but one can find lots of interesting things. In this case a student pair had looked at drug abuse statistics at the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics and, being source-critical, noted that the claim “The front page of DrugAbuseStatistics.org features the most noteworthy data regarding drug abuse” didn’t have any supporting source itself. I had to agree that this was the case. Furthermore, once I started browsing the website I realised there was absolutely no information about who NCDAS are. No address, no “About Us” box, no nothing. It seems unlikely that this would be some government organ.
Next step was to google their name to see if anyone else commented on their affiliation, but here, too, absolutely nothing. However, lots of hits on other sites that refer to the statistics collected by them. And I wondered: Is the official-sounding name enough for everybody and their grandmother to assume that this is the best data available, citing them, thus making sure they get to the top of the google searches for drug statistics? They do give sources for their statistics, but even I haven’t made the effort to double-check that the statistics are correctly quoted from the given sources, whose quality in turn is unclear.
To be sure, they might be perfectly legit, but how do we know that?
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