Methods & Experience

Effective information retrieval and valuable information sources

First published July 31, 2019 · last updated October 3, 2026 · Kurt Brand

In the information age, in which the data economy is rapidly gaining importance, it is mission-critical to know how to quickly and efficiently retrieve trustworthy, high-quality, up-to-date information from reliable sources. This article provides some ideas on how to cope with this challenge. At the end you will find a list of reliable and valuable information sources, which I have been using myself and can therefore vouch for as reliable and valuable.

Knowledge gains its meaning in context

Some years ago, one of my former staff members taught me the quite important insight that “knowledge primarily gains its meaning in a context”. Example: It’s certainly useful to know how to drive a car; however, if you’re stranded on a desert island, this knowledge won’t help you. Instead, it would be better to know how to make a fire or how to open a coconut. So, context matters.

Context matters from a different perspective as well: As the following chart published on Reddit under the headline “Top 4 countries with highest CO2 emissions per capita are Middle-Eastern” illustrates, Qatar is supposed to be the country with by far the highest CO2 emissions per capita on planet Earth, followed by Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE):

Top 10 countries with the highest CO2 emissions per capita

Environmentally sensitive people who have never been to the Middle East could react emotionally to this information and be outraged at how irresponsible Qatari people are about our environment.

The impact of this information suddenly changes when per capita emissions are put in relation to the size of the population. As of 2018, Qatar has only 2.72 million inhabitants (less than Berlin), Kuwait only 4.57 million (less than Madrid) and the United Arab Emirates only 10.43 million (less than Paris), while countries like China or India each have around 1.4 billion (= 1,400 million) inhabitants. Besides, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are all three major oil and gas producers, and the extraction, refining and processing of oil and gas unfortunately generates a lot of CO2. Finally, the climate in the Middle East is comparatively hot, which means that virtually all buildings in the three countries are equipped with air conditioning systems that consume a lot of electricity, which in turn drives up CO2 emissions.

Conclusion: When interpreting per capita statistics, the number of related heads must always be taken into account in order to come to a meaningful interpretation.

In the following chart based on 2016 data, the population size of the world’s countries and regions is plotted on the x-axis and the per capita CO2 emissions of these countries and regions on the y-axis. One can see at first glance that China, the USA and India are by far the largest CO2 emitters on our planet, which results from their population size and their per capita CO2 emissions, while all states of the Middle East together form a narrow line at the left edge of the chart:

Worldwide CO2 emissions per capita and region relative to population size

A second informative graph shows the global CO2 emissions of states and regions in 2018, including the development since 1990. It’s taken from an article published by the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on December 7, 2019, under the headline “World Climate Conference: The scramble for emission rights” (see t1p.de/jue0):

CO2 emissions in 2018 and development since 1990

Lessons learned: Higher per capita emissions of states with just a few million inhabitants are a much smaller problem than lower CO2 emissions of states whose population is hundreds of millions or even more than a billion and whose economy is also growing dynamically – this applies to most developing and emerging countries, particularly China, India and the 54 African countries.

Key takeaway: When looking at a piece of information, do yourself a favor and always try to understand the “big picture” and the context of this information. If you don’t, you make yourself an easy victim of miserable creatures who try to manipulate you.

Data, information, knowledge, insight and wisdom

Before we go any further, we should understand how to distinguish between the terms “data”, “information”, “knowledge”, “insight” and “wisdom”. The following chart is taken from an article published on June 20, 2019, under the headline “Data to Wisdom via Information, Knowledge & Insight”:

From data via information, knowledge and insight to wisdom

The article’s key message in my own words: Data has been making headlines for years – hailed as “the new oil” or as “big data” that seemingly answers the big questions of our time on its own. In its raw state, however, data has little value. What counts is what you do with it. The five-stage model illustrates this path:

In the following, I will use the term “information” synonymously for data or knowledge (even if this is not 100% correct).

Timeliness: nothing is as old as yesterday’s newspaper

So, let’s dig deeper into the topic of how to retrieve, validate and organize information most effectively. One big challenge is the freshness and timeliness of information. Certain kinds of information become outdated quickly; think e.g. of statistics on economic or societal events or developments. The vernacular says: “Nothing is as old as yesterday’s newspaper” (except perhaps this morning’s tweet on Twitter).

Not least for this reason, in the information age, in which the data economy is rapidly gaining importance, it is mission-critical to know how to quickly and efficiently retrieve trustworthy, high-quality, up-to-date information from reliable sources.

According to the “Digital 2026 Global Overview” report by We Are Social and Meltwater (October 2025, DataReportal), the global coverage of internet, mobile phones and social media looks as follows, based on a world population of 8.25 billion:

For comparison: The “Digital 2019” report still showed 5.11 billion mobile users, 4.39 billion internet users and 3.48 billion social media users out of a world population of 7.676 billion.

And please be aware: A handful of people at the top of Facebook, Google/Alphabet, YouTube and Twitter largely decide what information much of the world gets to see. Critics call them the “Silicon Six” – all American billionaires, unelected, unaccountable to any government and, according to this criticism, more interested in their share price than in protecting democracy (t1p.de/kqi6).

Evaluating the trustworthiness of a source

There are various sources that provide useful instructions on how to evaluate the trustworthiness of an information source. The following chart provides an excellent summary comprising eight different steps. The source is the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users (t1p.de/t3ym):

How to spot fake news – eight steps by IFLA

Background of the infographic: After Oxford Dictionaries named post-truth its Word of the Year 2016 (see t1p.de/r0nq), IFLA saw a need to promote critical thinking as a key skill of the information society. The eight steps are based on FactCheck.org’s 2016 article “How to Spot Fake News” (see t1p.de/cyy9).

How I organize my personal knowledge base

Given the fact that information can become outdated quickly, I organize my personal “knowledge base” as follows:

  1. When I read an interesting newspaper article, I immediately send an email to myself comprising the information source, the headline, the issue date and the hyperlink to the original source. In rare cases I additionally copy an important quote into the email, and sometimes I classify the email with a tag or label. With the help of modern full-text search engines, I can quickly retrieve interesting information at a later point in time from my extensive email database, which now contains around 110,000 emails. I usually remember that there was a good article in newspaper X about topic Y (and sometimes the approximate time when the article was published).
  2. Interesting and extraordinary graphics and photos play an important role as eye-catchers in social media and business networks such as LinkedIn and XING. Therefore, I have built up a collection of useful graphics and photos that I save on the hard drive of my iMac and in cloud-based solutions such as Box.net, Dropbox or Apple iCloud. In the event that a social media or business network site does not allow uploading graphics or photos (such as XING), I upload the graphic or photo to Postimages.org and use the link the site provides to share it. For editing graphics I can recommend the Movavi Photo Editor.
  3. Over the years I have built up a list of trustworthy and useful sources of information, which I continually enhance and update. The current status of this list can be found at the end of this article.
  4. Since I post information on LinkedIn daily, it is important for me to be able to access this information again at a later date. Unfortunately, LinkedIn still does not offer a capable search function for content – which I consider an embarrassment for a leading business network in the information age. There is a workaround to at least recapitulate your own content (e.g. account data, posts, connections and other activities) in the form of a so-called LinkedIn archive. You can request a download of this archive via “Settings & Privacy” in the upper right corner of the LinkedIn website and then click on “Download your data”. However, the process is quite clumsy, since a big chunk of the information is provided in the form of Excel tables, and the information provided only covers a certain time span. Similar options are available for Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.
  5. For translating German web pages into English and vice versa I use Google Translate (website translation). In my experience, the best English-German dictionary is Linguee (www.linguee.com) and the best translation engine for comprehensive texts is DeepL (www.deepl.com/translator).
  6. Sometimes websites are shut down for various reasons. In these cases you may find copies of the website at different points in time at archive.org. Archive.org is also useful for reviewing the development of a website over a longer period of time.

The following table provides orientation on which sources of information are best for finding the type of information you need for research projects (source: University of Illinois Library (archived copy)):

Select the best information source

Agenda-setting: who decides what we think about?

Final remark: Researchers have long been intrigued by the media’s effect on the public agenda and how public opinion is formed. In 1922, Walter Lippmann, a newspaper columnist, first posed the idea that mass media shape public perception with images. His notion, based on the public’s limited first-hand knowledge of the real world, created the foundation for what has come to be known as “agenda-setting”. The agenda-setting theory claims that media play an influential part in how issues gain public attention.

Conceptualized over time, agenda-setting is the dynamic process “in which changes in media coverage lead to or cause subsequent changes in problem awareness of issues” (Brosius & Kepplinger, 1990; Lang & Lang, 1981). Bernard C. Cohen observed in his 1963 book “The Press and Foreign Policy” that the press may often fail to tell people what to think, but is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.

Whether social or political, local or national – public issues are generated by the media, and in today’s era of social media also by us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn. Taking this into account, it is less important how we position ourselves on topics in social media than which topics we highlight at all and thus put on the public agenda.

This leads us to another interesting question: Why do lemmings throw themselves off a cliff to their death? Maybe because they don’t know what they’re doing?

Lemmings jump off the cliff

There are theories suggesting that public policy makers, political parties, lobbyists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) should become “choice architects”, strategically designing the basis and context for individual choices of citizens in areas such as climate change, energy, transportation, nutrition, the EU, the euro or immigration.

This is implemented through communication and manipulation practices and techniques such as #agendasetting, #priming, #framing, #nudging, #persuasion or #coercion (a reading list with more detailed explanations is provided here: t1p.de/ok1a).

Marketing influence

By taking information out of context, using biased language and one-sided arguments, continuously and repeatedly bringing key messages into people’s minds, or building up little guardrails and hurdles (taxes, policies, norms, …), the lemmings are moved to the cliff in a subtle way and convinced that it’s their mission to jump into their doom.

The only way to defend yourself against these #narratives is to develop a sense of the mechanisms, to get an overview of numbers, data and facts, and to contradict when someone tries to use these mechanisms in public.

Besides, in discussions with “choice architects” in social media, Paul Graham’s hierarchy of disagreement might be useful – see the following chart and the explanations provided in a Big Think article published on March 16, 2018, under the headline “How to disagree well: 7 of the best and worst ways to argue”: t1p.de/741f.

Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement

My list of valuable information sources

Having said this, I would now like to provide you with the promised list of valuable general information sources. I originally started building up this list for my own convenience, and I continuously enhance and update it. I would encourage you to click through the links to gain an overview of the information provided by the various sources. Most of them are really informative and you can learn a lot. If you have proposals on how to enhance and optimize the link list, I am happy to consider your input in the next update cycle.

General information sources

Best tech, innovation and inspiration channels on YouTube

Learning platforms for students and adults

Newspapers and news portals

Last but not least

t1p.de/7kbi – Medium.com article published on September 15, 2016, under the headline “The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen”.

Complementary readings

  1. A comprehensive introduction to “Digital business models and platform economy” is provided in my blog post published on November 4, 2017: kubraconsult.blog/2017/11/04/digital-business-models-and-platform-economy (German version: kubraconsult.blog/2017/09/06/digitale-geschaeftsmodelle-und-plattformoekonomie)
  2. The socio-economic consequences of digitalization are described in my blog post of the same name published on March 17, 2017: kubraconsult.blog/2017/03/17/the-socio-economic-consequences-of-digitalization (German version: kubraconsult.blog/2017/03/14/die-soziooekonomischen-folgen-der-digitalisierung)
  3. Thoughts on the basics of change are provided in my blog post “Basic prerequisites for effective change” published on August 28, 2018 (so far only available in English): kubraconsult.blog/2018/08/28/basic-prerequisites-for-effective-change
  4. “Facts and Figures on climate change and global warming”, published on May 12, 2019 (so far only available in English): kubraconsult.blog/2019/05/12/secrets-and-lies-of-the-climate-change