For my fact check using move four, I decided that since I am an avid My Chemical Romance fan, I would see if there were any studies that incorporated the group. To begin, I typed “My Chemical Romance studies” into DuckDuckGo. The first result was an MTV.com article, which claimed that listening to My Chemical Romance is good for your health. The article said that listening to heavy metal and screamo music helps people to process anger, and that “this type of music regulated sadness and enhanced positive emotions.” I was skeptical of whether or not there was any scientifically proven research behind this claim, but after finding a link to a scientific study in the article, I decided I would investigate whether it was reputable.
To begin, I found that in 2015 the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience journal posted the study, “Extreme Metal Music and Anger Processing,” which spurred the MTV.com post about how listening to My Chemical Romance is good for your health. In an attempt to gather information about the journal’s reputation, I went to DuckDuckGo and typed in “frontiers in human neuroscience reputation -site:frontiersin.” From there, I clicked on the Frontiers In Wikipedia page, which described the journal as an “academic publisher of a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal, which is currently active in science, technology, and medicine.” The article continued on to say that it was founded in 2007 by a group of neuroscientists, and is based in Switzerland, with other offices in London, Madrid, Seattle, and Brussels.
The Wikipedia page also stated that the journal participated in predatory publishing acts, which is detrimental to its credibility. However, the journal is still an active member of the Committee on Publication Ethics and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.
From there, I decided to investigate the credibility of the authors of the journal article, Leah Sharman and Genevieve Dingle. When I typed their names into the search bar, the first result that I found was a page of their journal articles, conference papers, research reports, and theses from the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia. These findings demonstrate that both authors have an academic background in both Psychology and research, which contributes to their overall credibility. When I began to look further into what prior research the authors had conducted, I found that Sharman’s thesis was titled “Frustration Sublimation: An Investigation Into Anger Processing Among Extreme Music Listeners.” The two also conducted a research study focusing on reward sensitivity and music involvement, which I found to be pertinent as well. Furthermore, when I researched both names on Google Scholar, their article about extreme metal music and anger processing was the first search result that appeared.
I then began to investigate what Frontiers In’s most recent impact factor score was. To find this information, I went to the Rowan University Database Library and located the InCites Journal Citation Reports. From there, I typed “Frontiers In Human Neuroscience” into the search bar, and was able to find out that the journal was given an impact factor of 2.870 out to 10+ in 2018. I also discovered that it had a median article citation of 2 and a median review citation of 4.
Ultimately, I was able to deduce that Frontiers In is a reputable scientific journal, and that the study in question was conducted by two people who have published other research studies through a respectable university. While the study did not exactly match the MTV.com article in the sense that it was not specifically conducted to determine why listening My Chemical Romance is good for people’s health, it did focus on metal music, which the band could be grouped in with.
Writing, Research and Technology 