"Do your research"

I work at a public library where, as it happens, almost nobody does any real research, unless it’s of the genealogical nature. We (librarians) do research for work, of course, but the public is never really researching anything serious. We provide access to several databases that are—for the most part—easy to use and reasonably accessible to most anyone. All you need is a library card (free) in good standing (no fees racked up). No one I know has any real excuse not to use these research sites to find out as much as they could want about any subject, whether current or ancient. Yet, they rarely do.

These databases will put you in touch with anything from periodicals to scholarly papers like peer vetted dissertations, even medical journals, with access to the most up-to-date entries. You can be as specific as you like and select which precise day and year you want your information from. You can save the information you discover, as you find it, to a special folder in your Google Drive, or you can email it to yourself. Just about anyone who works at a library can point you to these resources and if they don't know how to access them, they can find you someone who can help.

With all the hub-bub lately about people saying "Do your research" (which has become a euphemism for 'don't trust mainstream scientific and medical information') you'd think that there would be an uptick in people accessing and using the free, high quality research tools and asking the helpful government officials (like reference librarians) who are happy to help navigate the waters of information retrieval. We hear all the time how people’s taxes ‘pay our salaries’. It seems they’d want to take advantage of what those taxes purchase for them. However, there has been an actual 'downtick' in access to these databases, which doesn’t make sense in the slightest to me.

I guess we can assume this lack of research on free library databases means that the people saying “do your research” are also not going to their local academic libraries, or their local logic professor either. Which begs the question: where is all this research being done? By research, do they mean watching videos on YouTube? How are those videos vetted? Are they peer reviewed? By research, do they mean following links through Facebook and Twitter and other social media “newsfeeds” that lead them to highly polished 'articles' and down a rabbit hole of dubious information that is likely manufactured in a troll farm in Eastern Europe? What process do they use to question and test the information that they find on those platforms? This seems like the opposite of research to me.

I want to know how "Do your research" became the battle cry and the unifying wail of part of our populus that couldn't even find their way through a basic online catalog to find a book on epidemiology. They might not even know how to look up the word in the dictionary. How does this impared grasping for information that already agrees with a pre-baked parochial worldview equal research? The use of the word ‘research’ has become so hackneyed that it no longer even holds water. The instant anyone says ‘research’ in this way, I automatically assume that they cannot even fathom what actual research is. 
What’s a word for the opposite of research? I looked it up in the dictionary and came up with “sciolism” which means “a superficial show of learning”.

Being around all these sciolists, I imagine must be like living in a kind of bizarro world, in which when people say one thing, they mean the exact opposite. And yet, to challenge these so-called researchers on their findings is to find oneself in an infinite regress where the chain of reasoning (I use that term loosely) loops back on itself endlessly. They are never going to listen to anything that challenges their ‘discoveries’ because anything outside of the snow globe of their ‘research’ must be wrong since they don’t agree with it. It would be easier to just look something up via the library databases, honestly.

How do we react when we read or hear this nonsense battle cry, “Do your research”? Do we just ignore it? As a professional with at least part of my job being research dependent, I feel a tiny bit responsible for the state of affairs that has allowed this new willful ignorance to become the status quo. I am also resentful of how flippantly people throw around a word they don’t understand and have no idea how to use appropriately. I wouldn’t mind so much, if good people weren’t dying as a result of blinkered anti-vaxx sentiment and proto-fascist political ideology. There will always be someone who believes in supermarket tabloid conspiracy theories. My guess is that if they actually did their research, using the tools provided for them free of charge at their local library, we wouldn’t be in this fix, lives wouldn’t be lost senselessly and our democracy wouldn’t be under attack from within.

I guess in the meantime, I'll do my own research since I at least know how...