The News We Use: A Systematic Scoping Review of Fake News Stimuli in Psychological Research

Research into fake news has surged in popularity, with over 3,000 publications on the topic each year since 2021. Definitions of what constitutes “fake news” vary across the field of psychology, where source, number, content, and presentation of stimuli may all be different yet still described as “fake news.” Thus, conclusions drawn from fake news research may only generalize to the particular definition or presentation of fake news used in a given study. Relatedly, stimuli may not be available or described clearly enough for reproducibility. To assess the scope of these potential issues, we conducted and reported a PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) systematic scoping review of three databases including the last 11 years of psychology studies that used fake news stimuli. From the 881 included studies, we extracted and described the number, source, standardization, framing, and availability of fake news stimuli. Our findings suggest a large degree of stimuli variability, with high rates of example and full set availability. Most frequently, research stimuli were about politics and were framed as a social media post, and examples were given in-text. We also evaluated ratios of real to fake news stimuli, where an equal number of real and fake articles was the most frequent ratio. We recommend continued transparency, offering suggestions for open science practices following copyright law and considerations of generalizability regarding fake news in research.