These days, it seems that anyone with a question about minerals can simply connect to the internet and find whatever information they seek. This convenient approach, however, is increasingly fraught with the danger of receiving incorrect answers and misinformation. The internet is becoming a vast pool of bad data mixed in with the good, and for someone just starting out in mineral collecting, it can be nearly impossible to tell the difference. Separating the true from the untrue, fabricated, predatory, and deliberately misleading becomes increasingly difficult to do on one’s own.

What every mineral collector needs are reliable sources of information created and edited by experienced professionals. The most trustworthy articles follow professional standards for documenting their sources. The principle, supported by virtually all scientists, is simple: if readers wish to check and evaluate where an author’s information, ideas, and statements came from, they should be directed to the original source or sources for confirmation. Information that is not referenced to an earlier source represents the author’s own original contribution.

This is a great strength of the Mineralogical Record as a source of information for the collector. Every article is thoroughly vetted by knowledgeable reviewers and editors, and relevant references to previously published information on the subject are extensively documented for further study, should readers want to dig deeper. The authors, reviewers, and editors bring expertise to every article, providing a protective filter against bad data. And when an error does occasionally slip through, scientific publishing protocol requires that corrections be acknowledged and published.

Today’s mineral collectors have a choice about where they get their information: from the quick and easy, but often incomplete and unreliable, sources found online—or from an authoritative publication that serious collectors and leading connoisseurs have relied on for more than five decades.