The leading datasets for studying misinformation, disinformation, and online information reliability

NewsGuard data powers research studying misinformation, electoral integrity, media literacy, and other aspects of online news consumption habits. Our news source Reliability Ratings offer an independent, constantly-updated benchmark of news quality, and our Misinformation Fingerprints provide a curated catalog of the major misinformation narratives spreading online — and the sources that promote them.

Contact us about licensing opportunities for academic research.

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Learn more about NewsGuard’s rich datasets and tools:

  • Misinformation Fingerprints: NewsGuard’s global team of information reliability analysts maintains the internet’s most complete, continuously updated, machine-readable feed of data about false claims circulating online.

Available via a digital dashboard, API, or cloud-hosted data feed.

Media Coverage of Research Using NewsGuard Data

NewsGuard: Study finds no bias against conservative news outlets

Brands inadvertently funding online misinformation: Stanford study

Current engagement with unreliable sites from web search driven by navigational search

“NewsGuard has emerged as the most widely used database for source ratings and is especially popular in misinformation research for its comprehensive source-level trustworthiness scores.”

TU Graz

"Best practices for source-based research on misinformation and news trustworthiness using NewsGuard"

“[NewsGuard] offers what appears to be the most comprehensive data on website credibility that has been assembled to date. We expect that it will prove essential in our research.”

Brendan Nyhan

James O. Freedman Presidential Professor, Department of Government, Dartmouth College

White Paper

Research Backing NewsGuard's Reliability Ratings

This white paper summarizes research into misinformation's impact and potential solutions, illustrating how NewsGuard offers an effective approach backed by research. The paper also describes research projects that have been conducted using NewsGuard data.

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Case Study

Read about NewsGuard's data and the "Iffy" Quotient

The University of Michigan’s School of Information Center for Social Media Responsibility created a metric called the “Iffy Quotient,” which uses NewsGuard data and measures the percentage of the most popular news URLs on Facebook and Twitter that are from “iffy” sites that frequently publish unreliable information.

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Case Study

Analyzing Content Recommendation Algorithms

Researchers at Dartmouth, Indiana, and South Florida use NewsGuard’s Index to develop improved content recommendation algorithms. A project led by Brendan Nyhan from Dartmouth College, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia from the University of South Florida, and Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini from Indiana University used the Index to study how to improve the diversity of information circulating on social media.

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