Cognitive authority: A scoping review of empirical research. An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

This article provides a scoping review of 25 years of research on the notion of cognitive authority (CA), examining its conceptualization and empirical examination. The review follows the PRISMA statement and its extension for scoping reviews. Peer-reviewed journal articles on CA were identified through database searching with the specific search term “ cognitive authorit* ” in the title or abstract and covering work published in 2022 or earlier. In total, 235 unique references were identified, and their abstracts and then selected full texts were screened according to predetermined exclusion criteria. In total, 40 articles were included in the review, extracted, and analyzed with qualitative content analysis focusing on the conceptualization of CA, the methodological approach taken to examine it, and the different spheres of knowledge and levels of activity the research addressed. Based on this analysis, four parallel lines of research were identified including studies conceptualizing CA: (1) as an indicator of information source quality, (2) as discursively constructed, (3) as situated in social mechanisms and settings, and (4) as institutional legitimacy of science and professions. This body of research has extended Wilson's (1983; Second-hand knowledge: An inquiry into cognitive authority . Greenwood Press) original work contributing to our understanding of CA at individual, communal, and societal levels.


| INTRODUCTION AND AIM
How do we know what information sources we can trust when making decisions, learning, and interacting with others?This question concerning the authority of information and knowledge is pressing as our information environments are increasingly characterized by rapid flows of information with a diversity of origins and conflicting interests.Although the discourse around the "deepening crisis of authority" has been circulating for decades (Arendt, 1954), socio-technical developments revolutionizing access to and creation of information have led to a new kind of shift characterized as a transformation from centralized authority to mass collaboration (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011) and change in "ordinary" people's roles from passive consumers to co-constructors of public discourse.Contemporary technological developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics (Cath, 2018) together with emerging media, communication, and data processes (Couldry & Hepp, 2018) are further shaping the dynamics of authority in many spheres of human life, having an increasingly fundamental impact on people's thinking.This scoping review provides insights about this timely phenomenon by examining the notion of cognitive authority (CA), focusing on the ways it has been empirically examined within library and information science (LIS) and other fields of science during the past 25 years.
While the notion of CA appears in earlier scholarly work (see e.g., Fuhrman, 1979;Stich & Nisbett, 1980;Addelson, 1983), the concept was extensively developed by Patrick Wilson in his 1983 book Second-hand knowledge: an inquiry into cognitive authority.The central argument of the book is that knowledge is based on two types of information: first-hand experience and what people learn second-hand from others.Wilson (1983, p. 13) stated that all we know of the world beyond the narrow range of our own experience is what others have told us, it is "hearsay."CAs, according to Wilson (1983), are the information sources that have influence on people's thoughts and are deemed credible.This authority, according to Wilson (1983), is not based on status as administrative power but rather on the reputation and perceived expertise of an information source.Wilson (1983) pointed out that CA is a relationship involving at least two people, it is a matter of degree (one can have a little or a lot of it), and it is relative to a sphere of knowledge.Moreover, to be a CA, an information source has to be recognized as proper: credible and worthy of belief.Wilson noted that it is the basis of ordinary social life that other people are recognized as CAs in the sphere of their own experience; they are treated as generally competent and trustworthy in what they report on their own experience.Yet, some people are recognized as having more competence in a particular sphere of knowledge.This way, the notion of CA connects to expertise, but Wilson (1983) clearly differentiates the concepts saying that having authority is different from being an expert since "one can be an expert even though no one else realizes or recognizes that one is" (p.13).
Wilson (1983) stated that people mainly use indirect tests or indexes for credibility when claiming the CA of others.These include occupational specialization, formal education, reputation among peers, reputation among other CAs, and successful accomplishment.CA can also be based on personal trust, and views that are intrinsically plausible, convincing, or persuasive (Wilson, 1983).According to Wilson (1983), our CAs are among the sources that we deem credible and that influence our thinking.As such, influence is central to the notion of CA; a source can be deemed credible even though it would not have any influence on one's thoughts but CAs both influence thinking and are viewed as proper (Wilson, 1983).
Over the years, Wilson's (1983) theoretical work has gained interest mainly within LIS but also in other disciplines.Wilson's seminal work was followed with theoretical research around the concept, and the first empirical studies on CA were conducted only at the turn of the 21st century.These studies by Rieh andBelkin (1998, 2000) and Rieh (2002Rieh ( , 2005) ) focused on information seeking and searching on the Web, examining the concept of CA especially in relation to the notions of credibility and relevance (see Rieh & Danielson, 2007).Since then, the concept of CA has become increasingly central in research on human information behavior and practices that are being shaped with broader socio-technical transformations.These developments underline the importance of our scoping review.
Earlier reviews on the concept of CA have focused on CA in relation to the concept of credibility (Rieh, 2010;Rieh & Danielson, 2007) and on the ways informational and expert power are manifested in the characterizations of CA in the research literature (Savolainen, 2022).Most recently, research on authority-both cognitive and political-has been studied in connection to academic librarianship drawing attention to the wider political context (Bluemle, 2023).These reviews have scrutinized the concept of CA from the perspective of LIS and related fields, where the concept has received increased attention due to changing information, communication, and publishing mechanisms (Bluemle, 2023;Rieh, 2010).While the concept of CA has been addressed in connection to previous ARIST topics (Capurro & Hjørland, 2003;Case, 2006;Hjørland, 2007;Morris & Van der Veer Martens, 2008;Van House, 2004;Zuccala, 2009) and in the mentioned prior reviews (Bluemle, 2023;Rieh, 2010;Rieh & Danielson, 2007;Savolainen, 2022), a comprehensive review of empirical research on this central LIS concept is missing.The need for rigorous systematic reviews in LIS is evident as stated by Xu et al. (2015).
The present scoping review aims to provide an overview of the development of CA research and a timely discussion of the concept and its relevance in the current information environment.To increase understanding of CA in context, we focus on studies in which the concept has been empirically applied in research on human behavior and/or practices.Our theoretical point of departure is the notion of CA as defined by Patrick Wilson in his seminal work in 1983.However, as a scoping review, duplicates.After duplicate removal, 235 abstracts were included.

| Study selection and extraction of data
First, all abstracts (n = 235) were independently screened by one author (NH) based on the following exclusion criteria: 1.The article was not original research published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in English.2. The article did not report an empirical study.3. The term "cognitive authority" did not appear in the title or abstract.
Although keywords were included in the original search strategy, at this stage, we decided to exclude articles where "cognitive authority" was used as a keyword only and not mentioned in the title or abstract.Based on browsing the full-text articles where CA was only mentioned as a keyword, these articles did not address the concept of CA but related issues such as credibility or trustworthiness while we were specifically interested in the notion of CA and how it is being defined and applied empirically.
Second, the full papers (n = 79) were retrieved (NH, TN) and screened by all authors.An article was excluded at this phase if it met one or more of the following exclusion criteria: 1.The article was not published as a full paper in a scientific journal.2. The article did not report the findings of an empirical study.3. The study did not involve humans as study subjects or human-generated content.
In total, 40 articles were included in the review.These articles were reviewed and extracted in more detail jointly by all authors.At this stage, the following data were extracted from the articles: publication information; discipline (based on the first author's affiliation); theoretical viewpoint; description or definition of the notion of CA; author/authors cited in relation to or for defining the concept; the material and methods applied; and the main contribution related to the notion of CA (see Appendix A).

| Data analysis
Once the eligible articles were identified, to enable a deeper analysis, qualitative content analysis was conducted by two of the authors (MLH., NH) to identify methodologically diverse strands of research from the body of included articles.At this stage, treating an article as a unit of analysis, the original articles were organized into main categories and further into subcategories based on the extracted data and careful reading of the full-text articles.The categories and subcategories were identified inductively based on the theoretical viewpoints taken to conceptualize and empirically examine the notion of CA at different spheres of knowledge and activity at different levels (individual, communal, and societal).This analysis resulted in four main categories with their subcategories that characterize the different strands of CA research.In the Findings section, the articles are examined within these categories.

| FINDINGS
The four categories identified in the analysis of the reviewed articles (n = 40) represent parallel lines of research on CA including research where CA is conceptualized: (1) as an indicator of information source quality (n = 9), (2) as discursively constructed (n = 11), (3) as situated in social mechanisms and settings (n = 10), and (4) as institutional legitimacy of science and professions (n = 10).In Figure 2, the articles are displayed in these categories on a timeline.
While somewhat overlapping, the four lines of research reflect different conceptualizations and methodological approaches taken to empirically examine CA (Figure 3).

| CA as an indicator of information source quality
This strand of research has addressed the ways individuals judge information sources by identifying specific quality indicators, including indicators of their CA (Figure 4).Most of these studies were conducted in LIS and the notion of CA was understood as an indicator to recognize the quality of an information source when searching for information on the Web and judging its relevance.
This body of research includes studies characterizing CA as a defined and objective indicator of source quality (Section 3.1.1)as well as those viewing it as a social indicator of source quality (Section 3.2.1,Appendices A and B).

| CA as a defined, objective indicator of source quality
The first empirical study applying the notion of CA in LIS (Rieh, 2002) represents this subcategory that focuses on understanding CA as a defined information quality indicator.Based on Wilson's (1983) seminal work, Rieh (2002) applied the notion of CA by stating "… cognitive authority refers to influences that a user would recognize as proper because the information therein is thought to be credible and worthy of belief" and operationalized it as "… the extent to which users think that they can trust the information" (p.146).This application laid ground for later qualitative and quantitative studies examining CA in work settings of university scholars, medical doctors, and information professionals as well as in everyday life.These studies have examined CA as a related concept to other quality indicators or divided into sub-concepts applied for evaluating sources to gain information for decision-making in everyday life, learning, and work using mixed-methods for collecting data (think-aloud techniques/verbal protocols during searches, search logs, online diaries and surveys, interviews, pre and post search tests, digital resources) and mainly applying qualitative content analytic techniques or statistical analyses (Appendix A).
In her seminal study, Rieh (2002) introduced the notions of information quality and CA to allow a wider view to the assessment of information relevance than topicality which was traditionally used.Rieh examined these as related concepts from a user perspective, characterizing CA as "one of the quality control components in information retrieval" (Rieh, 2002, p. 147) in the uncontrolled Web information environment.She presented a model that linked the concepts with two types of judgments-predictive and evaluative-an individual made when first choosing a source and then assessing its relevance while seeking information.In addition to the notions of CA and second-hand knowledge (Wilson, 1983), the conceptual model combined theoretical aspects from research on judgment and decision making processes (e.g., Hogarth, 1987), relevance judgment in interactive information retrieval (e.g., Belkin, 1996;Cool et al., 1993;Wang & Soergel, 1998), information quality from Taylor's (1986) value-added model, and characteristics of information objects in Web pages (Rieh & Belkin, 1998).The practical operationalization of CA in Rieh's (2002) study built upon Wilson's (1983) external tests for recognizing CA.
The data for Rieh's (2002) study were collected by combining think-aloud techniques during searches, search logs, and post-search interviews with university students conducting search tasks in a laboratory setting.The data were qualitatively analyzed by applying grounded theory (Rieh, 2002;Strauss & Corbin, 1994).Using a Web page viewed by the study subject as a unit of analysis, it was coded as a CA when the subject showed that a chosen object was trustworthy, credible, reliable, scholarly, official, or authoritative.These were considered as the six facets of CA.Information quality judgments were identified in a similar manner as good, accurate, current, useful, or important.The study indicated a close relation of these two concepts as the users often made judgments of quality on the basis of the authority of sources.Moreover, Wilson's (1983) view of first-hand and second-hand knowledge was referred to in terms of making judgments of CA; based on the findings, sources were visited based on one's own experience of having visited a site before, but also second-hand knowledge was used "… to transcend the limits of personal experiences" (Rieh, 2002, p. 157).The study further indicated that Web users' judgments of quality and authority were influenced more by the institutional level of a source (e.g., source reputation, type of source/URL domain) than the individual level of a source (e.g., author/creator credentials).
A methodologically related study was conducted in the context of medical practice by Hughes et al. (2010) in the field of information systems science.Here, the focus was on information needs, search strategies, and judgment of information quality and CA to find out how predictive judgments may bias cognitive search models.CA was understood as a related concept to quality and credibility, and defined on the basis of Wilson (1983, p. 15) and in the same vein as Rieh (2002) referring to "influence on one's thoughts that one would recognize as proper" (p.436).Similarly to Rieh (2002), Hughes et al. (2010) applied CA to examine information in terms of trustworthiness and authority (a reference was made to Rieh & Belkin, 1998, 2000) and further linked CA with the notion of information quality as Rieh's (2002) six facets.Hughes et al. (2010) argued that the results support the view that medical doctors used mental models of web sites when searching for information, supporting a so-called "utilitarian view of mental models."They extended this view with notions of information quality and CA that were relative between different sites, arguing that this was a new insight to existing body of research (Hughes et al., 2010).
Custar and Sumner (2005) took a quantitative approach to examine CA in their study in computer science.The data were collected by interviewing digital library curators of a specific project and by using a corpus of 600 resources of the same project.Sixteen quality indicators of information sources were identified by piloting an automatic classification system for a digital library's resources using machine learning (Custard & Sumner, 2005).These indicators were further grouped into five categories: provenance, description, content, social authority, and availability.Besides defining CA as "the authority of the persons responsible for creating the content of a resource" (Custard & Sumner, 2005, p. 4/12), the roles investigated were author, contributor, editor, and publisher (based on prior research by Custard & Sumner, 2005;Fogg et al., 2001;Fritch & Cromwell, 2001;Katerattanakul & Siau, 1999;Rieh, 2002;Zhu & Gauch, 2000).Together with the quality indicator "site domain," "CA" formed the category "provenance." The category "social authority," in turn, consisted of the quality indicators "WWW" (the social authority of a web page on the WWW as measured by Google's PageRank) and "annotations" (the number of annotations associated with a resource).Digital library curators' (as domain experts) rankings of a corpus of resources were used to train a machine learning system to rank resources and to test the system's accuracy.Computer metrics experiments showed that resources can be automatically classified into quality bands.Testing confirmed that "CA" was one of the indicators that resulted in over 80% accuracy similar to such indicators as "metadata currency," "multimedia," "element count," "site domain," "WWW," "cost," and "link count."Custard and Sumner (2005) claimed that their study responded to "the critical need to provide intelligent decision-support tools to support the complex human judgements and processes involved in making quality determinations, and in curating digital collections to align with library policies on resources and collection quality" (p.10/12).
Further, CA was approached quantitatively in a study by Wu (2020) who examined quality judgments concerning auto-written (automatically generated) and humanwritten news stories.In this study, CA was understood and defined by using Wilson's (1983) external tests for recognizing CA related to credibility.Moreover, Rieh (2010) was cited when describing experimental stories that were created to distinguish news stories' institutional authority (publishing house or source) and personal authority (author) from authority based on intrinsic plausibility (content of text built on readers' own assessment) to evaluate objectivity, credibility, and overall quality of the news stories.A hypothesized News Quality Assessment Model was created and tested to assess how readers evaluated these two types of news (auto-written and human-written).Data were collected with an online survey, executed via a crowdsourcing website among adult readers (n = 370) and analyzed with a series of statistical tests.It was found that auto-written news stories were considered significantly more objective than humanwritten ones and were perceived as more credible both in terms of message and medium credibility.Specifically, auto-written news stories rated significantly higher when source and/or authorship information was not disclosed but when such information was included, human-written stories were rated less biased.The study indicated that when authority or source was not known, readers relied on textual authority (intrinsic plausibility) to evaluate the credibility of a news story.However, when institutional authority and personal authority were disclosed, readers combined the evaluation of textual authority with evaluation of the sources' features including its authoritativeness, reliability, reputation, and trustworthiness.Wu (2020) reflected the findings in the light of fake news assessment by stating "… this study highlights how autowritten and human-written journalism differ in readers' perceptions of objectivity, credibility, and bias" (p.1023) and claimed that the study may contribute to the digital journalism industry in the future.Perry (2018) examined the notion of CA in a LIS study with a mixed-methods approach to indicate the quality of research, more specifically a research article's CA when there was a conflict of interest related to academic and industry-sponsored research.Although a reference was made to Wilson (1983), his work was not clearly used for defining the notion.However, Wilson's (1983) view that college-educated people recognize the CA of science as an institution formed the basis for evaluating quality as CA reflected by believability, objectivity, and credibility of scientific articles by undergraduate students.The mixed methods of the study included examination of the students' perceptions of the CA of an article (measured by numeric values and the words used to describe the article's authority) and by pre-and post-tests in a laboratory setting (Perry, 2018).These data were analyzed with statistical and qualitative content analytic methods.Wilson's (1983) view of the CA of science was supported in that it was shown that, among the undergraduates, CA was attributed to authors from prestigious institutions and to articles from academic journals, with rigorous methodological choices and statistics, a peerreview practice, and citations.Skepticism was found for articles with weaker methodological approaches and that deviated from students' own worldviews (Perry, 2018).

| CA as a social indicator of source quality
The second subcategory represents research in which CA judgments are examined taking into account the social nature of these judgments.In these studies, besides Webbased information sources, peers, or other people within the same sphere of life or activity were considered to be among the used information sources and potential CAs.These studies were conducted in the user environment of an academic library and the wider information source environments of work and learning.All these studies originated from LIS and were mainly qualitative, using interviews, online diaries, log data, questionnaires, and web-sites to collect data, analyzed with qualitative content analysis including grounded theory (see also Strauss & Corbin, 1994) and using descriptive statistics (Appendix B).
The social dimension of understanding the notion of CA was present in Olander's (2008) socio-cultural study, examining changes in computer scientists' information behavior during a 20-year period.The focus was on the participants' careers, information seeking, and personal networks, and CA was understood as an indicator of source quality by citing Wilson (1983), though not clearly defining the notion.The qualitative analysis of the longitudinal data (interviews, questionnaires) indicated a change in the CA of sources that was noted as "they appear to have transferred the authority of their established journals and conferences in their field to Google unwittingly" (Olander, 2008, p. 9/11).However, information seeking had remained a social activity; for example, knowing an author was considered to be a criterion of quality, and the CA of peer-reviewers acknowledged in the context of academic journals.Olander (2008) concluded that these "… may be viewed as examples of a transformed social practice" (p.10/11).
In their phenomenological study, Bøyum and Aabø (2015) examined the information seeking practices of PhD students and the way the library's information resources were perceived.Bøyum and Aabø referred to Wilson's (1983) view of CA attributed to academic texts (cited also Rieh, 2005, p. 85) and included the social dimension to the notion of CA by arguing that Wilson (1983) was mainly concerned with whether or not users credited CA to librarians without acknowledging enough peers or colleagues as important sources of quality information.Bøyum and Aabø (2015) claimed that the CA people ascribe to texts was not related to "objective" quality indicators but to the way their value and reputation were negotiated (see Sundin et al., 2008, p. 22).Furthermore, they relied on Seldén's (2004) notion of information seeking practices covering both formal information seeking and social information seeking, considering social information seeking as based on "recommendations from colleagues" or "information exchange" as suggested by Wilson (2006, p. 188).Based on the analysis of semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire, the study indicated that despite the inclusion of social information seeking to the notion of CA, the examination supported Wilson's (1983) view about the CA of formal scientific and academic information sources.Overall, formal information seeking was a vital part of the PhD students' information practices and more typical than social information seeking.
In their qualitative study, Liu et al. (2019) focused on peer advice and advice from a CA to understand their effects on user education of an academic library.By drawing ideas from social comparison theory, peers were viewed as potential advisors in searching, and by citing Rieh (2002) and Wilson (1983) but not clearly defining CA, CA was operationalized in terms of an expert's (a university professor's) advice in conducting searchers.This CA advice was compared with peer advice operationalized as search tips from fellow students.Both types of advice were provided as user instruction educational videos online.The data, collected from undergraduate students, consisting of field and lab sessions with post-search interviews, log and diary data of task sessions, and statistical tests, were analyzed with qualitative content analysis and descriptive statistics.It was assumed that the two types of advice may influence individuals' Web search behavior while conducting the searches.Among other things, the behavioral effects of peer advice and of CA were measured by indicators directly associated with the search tips in the videos.The results indicated that both peer-advice and expert-advice-based (CA) user education significantly impacted many aspects of students' web search behavior and were deemed equally useful in motivating behavioral changes in searching.However, it was shown that instruction from an expert (CA) was more likely to generate continuing, at least short-term effects on Web search behavior than advice from peers (Liu et al., 2019).
While Liu et al. (2019) characterized CA as an expert source, Känsäkoski et al. (2021) took into consideration a variety of potential CAs.Taking a socio-cultural approach, they used Wilson's (1983) concept of CA to indicate how young people construct their understanding of the information they can trust.CA was operationalized as the credibility of information sources, inducing their perceived competence and trustworthiness, in relation to adolescents' health information needs and conceptions of health and wellbeing.The qualitative content analysis of interviews of secondary school students showed that family members and health professionals were considered as the most credible information sources for these adolescents in relation to health problems.Thus, Känsäkoski et al. (2021) argued that in health problems, they can be regarded as young people's CAs likely to influence their opinions.However, they found that in more general health information needs and in lifestyle issues, the range of information sources was considerably wider and credibility assessments were dependent on the subject (Känsäkoski et al., 2021).

| CA as discursively constructed
The second main category of studies includes those conceptualizing CA from a social practice perspective and focusing on CA construction.Common to these studies was that they built upon social constructionist ideas about CA as collaboratively constructed instead of representing the beliefs or attitudes of an individual or relatively stable authority indicators.This approach directs attention to the social practices with which a community collaboratively negotiates what counts as an authoritative information source or produces this authority in discursive encounters (McKenzie, 2003, pp. 262-263).
The studies were further divided into two subcategories based on their methodological approach: the first group of studies focusing on examining the construction of CA through language use (Section 3.2.1)and the second considering the multimodal aspects of this construction (Section 3.2.1; Figure 5).

| CA as constructed in language-use
Within this constructionist perspective, studies took more specific approaches to conceptualize and examine CA drawing from, for example, feminist philosophy and sociocultural approaches.To examine the construction of CA, the studies applied a qualitative research approach, collecting a variety of data, typically interviews and/or online content, and analyzing these data with content analytic or discourse analytic techniques.This strand of research mainly includes LIS research with the exception of studies from health sciences.Topic-wise, the studies focused on health and everyday information seeking (Appendix C).McKenzie's (2003) study on the discursive strategies used by women seeking information about twinpregnancy is the first conducted from a constructionist viewpoint.This viewpoint considers CA descriptions "in relation to the local discursive encounters in which they are produced," "focuses on language used to create descriptions of authority," and "considers cognitive authority not as accurate representations of preexisting beliefs or attitudes but, rather, as examples of everyday fact construction" (McKenzie, 2003, pp. 262-263).In addition to Wilson's (1983) conceptualization, McKenzie (2003) drew from Jordan's (1997) concept of "authoritative knowledge" which acknowledges the role of a community in determining what forms of knowledge should be recognized as proper.Moreover, her approach built upon previous research on the construction of discursive accounts (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) and factual descriptions (Potter, 1996) and positioning theory (Harré & Langenhove, 1999) to analyze the ways in which individuals make or dispute claims about the authority of information sources.To examine this empirically, McKenzie (2003) analyzed the interviews of pregnant mothers identifying how they positioned themselves and how they were positioned with respect to information sources and the way they used this positioning and other contextspecific discursive techniques to enhance and undermine the CA of different sources.McKenzie's (2003) identified three types of CAs including biomedical, experiential, and individual authority and exemplified strategies with which they were defended and justified.These strategies included positioning along with other discursive techniques, namely, the use of offensive and defensive rhetorics, interest management (e.g., demonstrating inappropriate interests), negotiation of category entitlement (e.g., membership in a group or category) and of factual consensus, and drawing attention away from the person ("out-there-ness").Moreover, these techniques were used in different ways in connection to different types of CAs.
The central ideas presented by McKenzie (2003) were continued in Prodinger and Stamm's (2010) study on the CA of medicine and Genuis's (2013) study on shared decision-making between women and health professionals-which resemble each other both thematically and methods-wise and represent health sciences.Prodinger and Stamm (2010) grounded their study on feminist philosophy and explored the professional and institutional CA of medicine based on an analysis of interviews and life stories of women suffering from rheumatoid arthritis.Similar to McKenzie (2003), Prodinger and Stamm (2010) explored how the traditional authoritative status of medicine was challenged by patients' own experience and knowing.They placed this phenomenon in a wider societal context of science by referring to "[t] he unexamined practices of cognitive authority within social arrangements in science which determine to a large extent what counts as legitimate knowledge …" and continue by citing Addelson (2003) describing CA to be enacted when "the specialist offers the correct understanding of reality while the lay person struggles in the relatively mere opinion" (p.170).This take on CA highlights the power relations between patients and specialists; physicians have the power to confirm or deny the reality of the client's body and, as such, based on Prodinger and Stamm's (2010) interpretation, hold CA within the system.
Using positioning theory as a theoretical viewpoint, Genuis (2013) examined menopause-related decisionmaking from the perspectives of women and health professionals, concentrating on information seeking.Genuis (2013) refers to McKenzie's (2003) study saying that it extends Wilson's (1983) notion of CA by showing how positioning is used to construct biomedical, experiential, and individual authority.Based on an analysis of interviews with women and health professionals, Genuis (2013) identified three positions representing how women identified themselves in relation to information seeking, namely, autonomous, collaborative, and dependent, and how those positions influenced their interactions with health professionals.In this study, women were found to position themselves primarily as autonomous, and to rely on their individual CA as unique interpreters of their own bodies and physical experiences.Health professionals, in turn, were seen as "trusted guides" or "hired consultants."However, collaborative positions were taken in describing situations in which health professionals fostered appreciation of different types of CA.Neal and McKenzie (2011) and, 10 years later, Montesi (2021), both from LIS, examined CA through the analysis of (social) media content.Using endometriosis blogs as material, Neal and McKenzie (2011) analyzed how bloggers made cases for and against the CA of information sources.The authors referred to Wilson's (1983) concept of CA arguing that it provided a useful framework for explaining an individual's situated judgments about the authority of information sources, saying that people "may use authority criteria that are completely distinct from those that information professionals use" (p.128).Neal and McKenzie (2011) found that bloggers constructed CA by invoking biomedical and experimental forms of knowledge, as well as spiritual or intuitive sources of information.A common strategy was to draw on category entitlement: being a member of a category (e.g., a doctor, a person with endometriosis) was treated as evidence to accept the person's knowledge on a domain.Based on these findings, the notion of affective authority was introduced and defined as "the extent to which the users think the information is subjectively appropriate, empathetic, emotionally supportive, and/or aesthetically pleasing" (Neal & McKenzie, 2011, p. 131).
Montesi (2021) examined authority construction in "fake news" focusing on CA but also adopting the concept of affective authority introduced by Neal and McKenzie (2011).Montesi (2021) defined CA referring Neal and McKenzie (2011) and Saunders and Budd (2020) saying that CA is "conceived as the result of social practices that allow a certain community to negotiate what counts as an authorized source of information" (p.458) and pointing out how it was "not only traditional indicators of authority, such as subject expertise and societal position, but also lived experiences, such as those shared on blogs or social media" (p.458, see Saunders & Budd, 2020) that ought to be considered.In their study, cognitive and affective authority were operationalized by determining whether pieces of "fake news" included indicators of CA or affective authority.Indicators of CA included (1) direct, firsthand experience (experiential knowledge) and subject expertise (2) without or (3) with institutional or other endorsement.Cues of affective authority included (1) discrediting people, ideas, or movements; (2) coarse or offensive language use; and (3) mentioning of additional sources or opportunities for further study.According to Montesi (2021), in most cases, the news pieces did not show any indication of CA, that is, professional or personal experience.With regard to affective authority, however, some 40% of the news were found to use such cues including discrediting people, ideas, or movements and often using coarse or offensive language.

| CA as multimodally constructed
Studies focusing on multimodal CA construction have adopted discourse analytic and critical perspectives to analyze interviews, observational data, and/or online content.This strand of research mainly includes LIS research with the exception of two studies from educational sciences, and builds upon multimodal critical discourse analytic, nexus analytic, and participatory approaches.Thematically, these studies address health, concentrating on social media and health education classroom settings, and science education (Appendix D).Ma and Stahl (2017) and Multas and Hirvonen (2022), both representing LIS, examined CA through the analysis of social media content.Multas and Hirvonen (2022) analyzed video bloggers' ways of constructing their own CA in relation to their audiences.They cited Wilson (1983) in arguing that CA "refers to human or nonhuman information sources that we 'recognize as proper' and that influence our thoughts" (p.44) and claiming that this influence is based on credibility.The study identified three different and often overlapping strategies to construct CA, namely, using experience-based information, embodied knowledge, and scientific information and educational expertise presented and performed in multimodal forms.This study highlighted how the video bloggers' ways of constructing authority followed the established practices of the wider vlogging community and as such pointed to the collective construction of CA.Ma and Stahl (2017) defined CA in accordance with Wilson (1983) noting that it indicates social recognition of an information source or person that is accepted as an epistemic authority by others interested in the subject.Their multimodal analysis of an anti-vaccination Facebook group addressed both the discursive construction and the contextuality of CA as it indicated that in this context, CA was not based on scientific reliability but instead on sharing the same general worldview and perceived problem resolutions.This CA construction was enabled by both the technological affordances of the online platform and the specific persuasive strategies used by people.
Hirvonen and Palmgren-Neuvonen ( 2019) and Nygård et al. (2021) have taken a CA-lens to examine information literacy practices in classrooms.Hirvonen and Palmgren-Neuvonen (2019), representing LIS, defined CA in accordance with Wilson (1983) saying that the concept "refers to information sources-human or non-human-that people deem credible and legitimate and that can influence their thinking" (p. 2) and highlighting that people are usually considered to have CA at least in the sphere of their own experience.The study pointed to CAs appearing as contextual and situational but also guided by broader discourses.In classrooms, these discourses were seen in classroom practices and tools that directed students to turn to specific sources and information channels, for instance.This, based on the interpretation of Hirvonen and Palmgren-Neuvonen (2019) created opportunities for (re)distribution of CA among the teachers, students, and other information sources.Also in a classroom setting, Nygård et al. (2021), representing educational sciences, focused on the informational authority roles of teachers.Following Wilson's (1983) definition, they viewed CA as "aninformation source "that influences one's thinking" and that is"recognized as proper" it is "considered to be credible, worthy of belief, and knowing 'what about what'" (p.2).Their findings illustrated how in classroom situations teachers switched between different informational authority roles, including that of a CA and of a trustee that guides students toward credible information sources (Jessen & Jørgensen, 2012), highlighting how their CA was not fixed but could fluctuate even moment-by-moment.Both of these studies were based on classroom observation, examining language use but also other discursive elements in the setting influencing the action being examined.
Kayumova and Tippins (2021), in turn, discussed CA in the context of science education and the boundary work that scientists conduct to preserve their CA.In their study, they sought to approach science education in a way that would enable the broadening participation in science including the consideration of often marginalized voices and ways of knowing.Referring to Jasanoff (1990) that builds on the work on Gieryn (see Gieryn, 1983), they argue that scientists tend to use various boundarydefining strategies to establish their authority and, while doing so, delegitimize different ways of knowing both in scientific sense-making and in science education.In their study, they took a "critical-response-ability" approach addressing this problem and designed participatory, design-based science education "explicitly recognizing young people and community members as equal and knowledgeable partners" (p.836) attempting to blur the boundaries of expert and novice, teacher and student, and adult and child.This study highlights how cultural and onto-epistemic heterogeneity and recognition of diverse CAs can be intentionally cultivated in classroom practice.Huvila's (2013) study on the role of Web searching as a source of CA diverges from others in this category as it does not focus on discursive CA construction but instead on "how and why search engines and especially searches are considered and claimed to be authoritative by searchers on the Web."However, the study shares common ground with the studies in this category as it highlights, referring to Jessen and Jørgensen's (2012) model of aggregated credibility and Addelson (2003), that CA is something that is being practiced, rather than a static feature of things and characterizing CA as residing in activity in addition to texts and people.The empirical study examined people's search-related utterances, collected by using webometrics, identifying three types of CA: people, search as an approach, and search as an activity.Based on the study, Huvila (2013) concluded that the CAs related to searching are abstract, exercised, and situational instead of being static and easy to label.

| CA as situated in social mechanisms and settings
With varying approaches but mainly drawing from constructionist ideas, a strand of studies has examined CA as part of a belief system, small world, community, or a sphere of interest.While sharing common ground with the research described in the previous section (Section 3.2), these studies have examined the situatedness of CA instead of concentrating on its construction, focusing either on established "cognitive authority figures" (see Section 3.3.1)or the situated nature of CA and the indicators of that authority in different settings (see Section 3.3.2;Figure 6).

| CA as situated in social mechanisms
The studies examining CA as part of social mechanisms have concentrated on examining established or even absolute CA figures and their impact within a setting as well as the role that CA plays in social interactions between actors.Applying both qualitative and quantitative approaches, often mixing both, the studies have explored CA figures in communes and in connection to sexual abuse narratives, health communication, and patient and caregiver experiences.Data collection methods have included interviews, questionnaires, written accounts and poems, and social media content, analyzed with narrative and textual analysis and statistical methods.This strand of research does not include LIS research but instead the studies originate from sociology, economics, and health sciences (Appendix E).
Sociologists Martin (2002) and DeGloma (2007) interpret CA as established authority and as part of a belief system referring to "cognitive authority figures" (DeGloma, 2007, p. 545;Martin, 2002, p. 872).Martin (2002) characterizes CA building upon the thinking of Durkheim (1912, as cited in Martin, 2002) and Kant (1787, as cited in Martin, 2002), discussing social authority in connection to shared beliefs.Martin (2002) argued that CA can be understood as a form of power and hypothesized CA to produce "tightness" within a belief system.The study was based on quantitative questionnaire data of people belonging to 44 urban communes (including, for example, organized guru-led Eastern religious groups, Christian and hippie communes, and alternative family communes) with information on around 600 persons.Since there was no direct measure for the presence or absence of legitimate CA in the communes, the "leadership" pattern in the commune was used as a proxy measure.Based on the study, Martin (2002) concluded that groups with an established CA figure had greater tightness of beliefs than groups without such authority figure.However, he pointed out that even in communes with strong authority figures, "gurus" with seemingly absolute authority, people were selective in what beliefs they considered to be validated by the authority (Martin, 2002, p. 894).
DeGloma ( 2007) continued Martin's (2002) discussion of CA and its relation to the belief systems in communities and referred to CA as "both a constructive force and a descriptive resource" (p.561) arguing that CA figures both serve to enforce scripted narrative accounts in particular contexts and serve as narrative resources for storytellers explaining their prior state of "false" and present awakening into a "true" belief.According to DeGloma (2007), CA figures teach individuals "to derive particular meanings from their experiences and interpret their lives in patterned ways" and are central in the stories people tell about their lives, especially when accounting for the rejection of previously held beliefs (DeGloma, 2007, p. 561).Based on the narrative analysis of written accounts of sexual abuse survivors and retractors (those who have repudiated their earlier claims of having been sexually abused), DeGloma (2007) identified the use of "vocabularies of cognitive constraint" to claim how CA figures had controlled the ability to interpret and remember experiences.Moreover, asymmetries in CA between the perpetrators and the child (with survivors) and in psychotherapeutic relationships (with retractors) were identified.According to DeGloma (2007), these narratives highlight the socializing power that adult authority figures exercise.
Böhmer's (2021) social scientific study took the approach of defining established CAs and examining their communications in times of crisis focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic.Böhmer (2021) argued that to be persuasive, health communication needs to be delivered by someone trustworthy and credible, "somebody who knows something we don't know" (Wilson, 1983, p. 10), saying that political elites can be potential CAs.Böhmer (2021) defined the notion of CA by pointing to its persuasive nature, referring to Wilson (1983) but also to Rieh (2010) who characterized CA as a kind of influence and to McKenzie (2003) who characterized CA in relation to positioning.Moreover, Böhmer (2021) drew from prior source credibility (see Flanagin & Metzger, 2000;Hovland et al., 1953) and social epistemology (Goldman, 2010) research in justifying the approach of the study.Böhmer's (2021) study examined how prime ministers of two European countries, as representatives of political elites, communicated on the pandemic on social media.By evaluating the posts of the prime ministers according to their approach to the virus (encouraging or discouraging the public to take precautions) and matching the evaluations of the posts with the numbers of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in each country, the study sought to examine if there is a correlation between the CAs' communication and the spread of the virus.They found that while both prime ministers encouraged responsible behavior of the general public, there was a between-country difference that the author interprets to show "how cognitive authorities communicate the crisis has an enormous impact on how the general public behaves in times of crisis" (Böhmer, 2021, p. 42).
Hunt and May's (2017) study representing health sciences used the notion of CA to develop a Cognitive Authority Theory that explains the negotiation of normative expectations in a health care setting.This theory of "the behavioral and social mechanisms through which people balance capacity and accountability in relation to a set of social roles and processes" (p. 1) points to the fundamental sociological problem of structure and agency examining it in the context of self-care of chronic medical conditions.This setting, according to the authors, offers an example of a domain in which "individuals negotiate their personal capacity for action whilst also interacting with institutional accountabilities and organizational expectations" (Hunt & May, 2017, p. 2).Importantly, this negotiation is characterized by the power relations between (less powerful) population actors and (more powerful) institutional actors.Without a reference to prior CA research, Hunt and May (2017, p. 6) described CA as "the extent to which population actors are seen by others to possess qualities of competence, trustworthiness and credibility in meeting the accountabilities and accomplishing the tasks implicated in a relational process," placing the concept as one of the key constructs of the Cognitive Authority Theory.The theory was developed based on interviews of men with a heart failure; review of studies of patient and caregiver experiences of this medical condition; reflection against the body of research on Normalization Processes, experiences of Cumulative Complexity, and Burden of Treatment, and construct validation based on patients' and caregivers' reports of heart failure.Essentially, the theory proposes that in a situation where participants with more power (institutional actors) can impose accountabilities and normative expectations for those with less power (population actors), the less powerful actors' possibilities to pursue their own goals depend on the degree of CA they can negotiate with the more powerful actors.Hunt and May (2017) argue that the theory is applicable "to any setting where inequalities of power exist" and that CA is the product of negotiations about agency between population and institutional actors.

| CA as situated in social settings
In contrast to the studies concentrating on established CA figures in communities or the positions of more and less powerful actors, a connected strand of research has highlighted the socially and contextually situated nature of CA.While in this way sharing common ground with the research described in the previous section (Section 3.2), these studies have not focused on the construction of CA but instead the judgments, views, and opinions of CAs in a specific setting or in connection to a sphere of interest.To examine this situatedness, the studies have applied both qualitative and quantitative approaches, often mixing both.Data collection methods have included interviews, questionnaires, and participatory methods, analyzed with qualitative content analytic techniques and descriptive statistics.This strand of research mainly includes LIS research, but sociology (Waity & Crowe, 2019) is also represented.Topic-wise, the studies have focused on activist information practices, health information, and teaching-learning (Appendix F).
In his study on the information seeking practices of environmental activists, Savolainen (2007) refers, along with Wilson (1983), to Chatman (1991) in pointing out that according to previous research, people often prefer information originating from first-hand experience of someone living in the same "small world" whereas second-hand information from outsiders is often not trusted or becomes ignored.CAs have the potential to influence one's thinking in a specific sphere of interest and therefore, Savolainen (2007) argues, the concept is closely related to media credibility as both concern the believability of information.Following Wilson (1983), Savolainen (2007) notes that CAs are not valued only for their stock of knowledge but also for their opinions and that the intrinsic plausibility of information is not "enough" and may be rejected if the information is not compatible with the information seekers values and aspirations.Based on the analysis of interviews of environmental activists, Savolainen (2007) could not identify "absolute" CAs.Instead, the significance of one's own reflection was emphasized, and the assessments were situationally sensitive.Moreover, he found the first-hand knowledge produced within the small-world of the activists to be more relevant than second-hand knowledge from outside sources, which was subjected to a more critical analysis (Savolainen, 2007).Mansour and Francke (2017) and Hirvonen et al. (2019) have both examined online discussions and emphasized the concept of credibility when examining CA.Mansour and Francke (2017) referred to Wilson (1983) in stating that CAs are "credible sources to whom people tend to turn to when they need to expand their knowledge of the world" (p.5).They view this concept to be in line with the sociocultural understanding that people rely on cultural tools and other people to understand the world, allowing conceptualizing how people and cultural tools "shape and are shaped by credibility assessment" (Mansour & Francke, 2017).In their study on a Facebook group of mothers, the group members were found to view the group as an acceptable source of personal rather than professional knowledge.The participants used a number of cultural tools when evaluating information credibility, including the evaluation of language use and writing style, other members' experience, expertise, and similarity, and their own education.Other members were seen as CAs based on either their expertise or their experience.An important tool in the assessment of the latter was the similarity of the person to oneself.
Hirvonen et al. ( 2019) took Wilson's (1983) ideas as a starting point, viewing CAs to be information sources that are deemed credible and that influence one's thoughts, and credibility as the combination of competence and trustworthiness.Based on a questionnaire survey of users of an online forum for girls and young women, the authors examined how members of the online forum acted as CAs to their peers either as individuals or collectively.They found credibility evaluation to be linked with both the conceptions of the forum and the type of information sought and indicated means to evaluate information credibility in this specific forum including author-related cues, argumentation and tone, veracity, and verification (Hirvonen et al., 2019).Both of these studies point to the situatedness of CA evaluation: evaluation is dependent on context and sphere of knowledge.The study by Neal et al. (2011) on emerging adults' opinions of online mental health resources further supports this by pointing out that people do recognize the usefulness of different types of sources.Neal et al. (2011) discussed the ways in which communities create the notion of CA through discourse (see Jordan, 1997;Oliphant, 2009;Tuominen et al., 2002) introducing the concept of "communal cognitive authority" and examined university students' views on different information sources.Based on the analysis of questionnaire data, Neal et al. (2011) found that online discussion boards and social networking sites were seen as useful sources of peer-support but not authoritative sources of educational information.
Different types of authoritative information were also addressed in Waity and Crowe's (2019) sociological study, in which CA was examined in the context of teachinglearning.Waity and Crowe (2019) used the concept of CA referring to Wilson (1983) to describe how people decide to trust the accuracy of what others have told them, noting that authority is relative, but not purely subjective (see Baer, 2018).Using participatory photo mapping, reflection, and final papers among college students and children, the study sought to teach students about different sources of authority (scholarly and community authority) on the concept of poverty.Waity and Crowe (2019) evaluated the students' learning outcomes through their written assignments that were analyzed focusing on understandings of sources of authority.While they found that the concept of CA was often mixed with political authority, Waity and Crowe (2019) argue that engagement with a local community in addition to academic sources provided students with increased understanding of the contextual nature of CA.
Hicks (2020) took a constructivist grounded theory approach to examine CA in connection to information literacy and among language learners entering an unfamiliar information environment.In this study, the concept of CA was used as a way to explore the role that knowledgeable people and objects play within information literacy practice.Hicks (2020) defined CA in accordance with Wilson (1983) saying that "people construct understanding through their own first-hand experience as well as through the second-hand interpretation and hearsay of people who are deemed as 'knowing what they are talking about'" (p.133) but acknowledged that CA is also an outcome of embodied expertise (Lloyd, 2012, p. 780) and produced through discursive action (McKenzie, 2003, p. 262).Moreover, Hicks (2020) argued that the way learners establish CAs illustrates how information literacy centers on negotiation of the ways in which communities legitimize and devalue knowledge structures rather than merely on the recognition of specialist expertise.According to Hicks (2020), CAs not only provide useful advice about "how to treat certain pieces of information" but their actions also constrain and enable information literacy practices.Furthermore, the study illustrates how CAs can "create a route from the periphery to the center of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991)," showing how information literacy is shaped in relation to power and expertise.

| CA as institutional legitimacy of science or/and professions
The fourth and final category represents research where CA has been used to refer to the legitimacy of social institutions of science and professions.The manner of understanding CA varied in the studies and the notion was not always clearly defined but used to refer to the epistemic systems of science and professions.In many of these studies, the social nature of CA was emphasized and the notion understood as a negotiated institutional status of science and professions in practice-between science and professions, science and wider publics, and within politics.The notion of CA was used to refer to the dominance of natural sciences over human sciences and other fields of research and as connected to the maintenance of the status of traditional professions (such as lawyers, economists/accountants, policy actors) and those that are emerging (industry analysts).Although these studies represent social sciences, Wilson's work was cited in a minority of them: the one in LIS (Hultgren, 2013) and a recent study in economics (Daoust & Malsch, 2020).Common to all these studies was a qualitative approach (Appendices G and H).
To allow a more comprehensive understanding of approaches to CA, the studies were further divided into two subcategories (Figure 7): CA as institutional legitimacy of academic research (Section 3.4.1)includes research focusing on the way the CA of a field was maintained in scientific practice and how legitimate scientific knowledge was produced and interpreted in specific ethnic communities.CA as institutional legitimacy of a profession (Section 3.4.2) focuses on research concerned with the legitimacy of knowledge production and maintenance in professional work and the use of information to find a path to a profession.

| CA as institutional legitimacy of science
The studies focused on CA related to the legitimacy of scientific knowledge, maintenance of CA, and the way of producing knowledge in natural sciences, also in relation to the changing scientific institution, by taking a qualitative approach.The concept of CA was not clearly defined, but often used to refer to the epistemic systems of science, for example, maintenance of the status of scientists and clinicians, the legitimacy of genetic knowledge about the origins of people, and the CA of a researcher whose position was based on contradictory ethics in formal scientific practice and traditions of the studied ethnic community.The study subjects were scientists and clinicians, rabbis, and members of a religious community, and the researcher herself conducting her study among indigenous people.The qualitative data including narratives and survey responses were analyzed using thematic, discourse, and narrative analysis (Figure 7; Appendix G).
The earliest study in this subcategory, conducted already at the end of the 20th century by Kerr et al. (1997), examined how new genetics scientists and clinicians maintained their expertise, authority, and autonomy when they discussed their social roles in society.In their sociological study, Kerr et al. (1997) used the notion of CA to refer to scientists' position in society, but did not clearly define the concept.The standpoint related to the power relations between the scientific and the social realms reflected by their discursive boundaries.In the light of the "elite" genetic scientists' and clinicians' discurse about knowledge, it was explored how they separated science from society.The notion of CA appeared to combine objective and social aspects, as Kerr et al. (1997) noted that to consider CA "… we must examine the social structural context of interviewees' accounts" (p.296) and examined CA on the basis of professionals' objectivity and neutrality (based on Weingart, 1982, p. 297).Ten years later, Parry (2009) used the notion of CA to examine the professional authority of stem cell scientists as knowledge produces par excellence and, more broadly, the ethical legitimacy of stem cell science.In this study, CA was understood as a negotiated practice and the focus was placed on stem cell scientists' status and how it was negotiated and defended.Parry (2009) argued that, at the time, the study was called for as stem cell scientists' CA was not fully won in the cultural context of public engagement and the governance of stem cell research (SCR), when science-public relations were transforming.The qualitative data (interviews, documents of parliamentary debates) were analyzed with discourse analytic techniques (see Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984).To refer to scientists' discursive work to demarcate their work as cognitively and ethically legitimate, the analysis was further supported with the notion of boundary-work (Gieryn, 1983(Gieryn, , 1995(Gieryn, , 1999;;Parry, 2009, p. 94).
These qualitative approaches highlighted discursive boundaries as important elements for the protection of CA among scientists.The analytical approaches applied the work of Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) and drew from prior work on expertise and responsibility, for instance the work of Abbott (1988).A discursive boundary was identified between new genetics scientists and clinicians and society and also the public who were characterized as ill-informed about new genetics (Kerr et al., 1997).The boundaries were to support scientists and clinicians' role to educate people and enhance government policy.It was claimed that the flexible discursive boundaries promoted rather than challenged new genetics professionals' CA as they engaged also in debates about their work's social implications.They managed to preserve their CA when succeeding in negotiating a position of disinterested concerns that allowed an interface with society (government, education, and patients) but ignored their own social location (Kerr et al., 1997).Similarly, it was shown that when seeking to preserve their CA, stem cell scientists took on multiple roles in relation to multiple boundaries simultaneously when publicly debating their research (Parry, 2009).Egorova (2009), in their study originating from anthropology, analyzed the contradictory views of the genetic origin and identity of Jewish people applying the notion of CA to refer to the institutional position of natural sciences in the Western academic tradition and in relation to genetics research (Egorova, 2009).The notion of CA was not explicitly defined.The data of two case studies, based on responses to a questionnaire about views on genetic DNA tests among the Bene-Israel on the Konkan coast, India, a book by Kleiman (2004) "which reflects on a wide range of genetic studies conducted among the Jews" (p.160), and senior rabbis' interviews in South Africa, were analyzed with content analytic techniques.Through an interpretative and argumentative analysis, it was concluded that in both cases, genetics proved to be a rhetorical source for identifying what Jewishness was.It was stated that the CA of genetics, though not indicating a unified origin for Jewish people, allowed multiple interpretations to support that view.Thus, Egorova (2009) suggested that both cases were examples of a "rhetorical edge" of culture and referred to the works of anthropologist Carrithers (2005, as cited in Egorova, 2009).
Irrespective of whether the Bene-Israel and Rabbi Kleinman believe in the validity of natural sciences themselves, they are certainly aware of the cognitive authority that is ascribed to in the West by virtue of its apparently objective methods and context independence (Egorova, 2009, p. 171).
In an auto-ethnographic study originating from the field of indigenous knowledge and education, Hall (2014) used the notion of CA when exploring the authority of a researcher conducting her study in an intersection of the Western academic research environment's rules and norms and the ones of a cultural space that was being investigated.Hall (2014) did not define the concept of CA explicitly but used it to refer to the collective "knowledge authority" and the ethical manner of producing knowledge in research, in this case a doctoral study.This auto-ethnographic study was based on the researcher's self-reflection of her own experiences through an interpretative and argumentative grip (Hall, 2014).
In both above-mentioned studies (Egorova, 2009;Hall, 2014), the notion of CA was used to refer to the position of science as an institution but the empirical environment where it was examined was that of communities with strong cultural traditions.In particular, the study by Hall (2014) reflected a "battle" between the legitimacy of first-hand knowledge based on a researcher's own experiences and the legitimate practice of producing second-hand knowledge in academic research.Furthermore, the study discussed the legitimacy of knowledge production in science from an empancipatory perspective.In the same vein, Egorova (2009) concluded that "[t]his lack of 'scientific' consensus about the origin of Jewish communities may contribute to the emancipatory potential of population genetic research which otherwise has a built-in determinist agenda" (p.172).Hall (2014), in turn, concluded that the idea of a relational approach to research ethics enhanced new ways of conducting empirical research in culturally complex spaces.Based on Addelson's (1994) and Rose's (2004) work, Hall (2014) suggested that researchers "must explore their own knowledge position" (p.338), grounding their work in relational ethics.

| CA as institutional legitimacy of a profession
Studies examining the authority of a profession drew partly from the body of research on the sociology of professions.The notion of CA was not always clearly defined but was rather applied in relation to the epistemic systems of knowledge production of professions and also to the commitment of a profession to these systems in their daily work practices.Mainly taking a qualitative approach, the studies' approaches varied from interpretative studies in economics focusing on CA among accountants' profession to ethnography among industry analysts of a private IT company and further to a social anthropological auto-ethnography of the official practices of migration law in European countries and a phenomenological one in LIS looking at the interaction between a researcher and a student making a career choice to a lawyers' profession.The most recent study was based on actor-centered constructivism from an institutionalist perspective to indicate how CA was constructed among policy actors to reflect the ideas of the European Central Bank.Interviews were a common data collection method in all studies, in some cases combined with other methods including participative interaction and observation and collection of field-notes, emails, and reports.Typically, these data were analyzed with qualitative content analysis (Figure 7; Appendix H).
In their interpretative study, Durocher and Gendron (2014) pursued to examine the relation of knowledge and professionalization when professional standards were shifting.They drew from the work of Larson (1977) who used the concept of "cognitive unity" to refer to the extent of an occupation's members agreement of a specific cognitive base, and of Abbott ( 1988) who highlighted the vitality of inter-professional competition when constituting jurisdictional work-both considering knowledge as a core feature in professionalization.The notion of CA was understood as referring to the hallmarks of a profession and to the ability to maintain jurisdiction as an outcome of expertise and knowledge, and further linked with the concept of a "knowledge template" as a set of "coherent ideas that standard setters, professional service firms and individual practitioners employ to make sense of reality and intervene in the field" (Durocher & Gendron, 2014, p. 632).Commitment to conduct practice according to these templates was examined by applying the notion of epistemic commitment.Through qualitative content analysis of accountants' interviews, three main types of commitment were identified (active advocacy of fair value; flexible adherence; dissidence toward fair value).Furthermore, Durocher and Gendron (2014) argued that , overall, the epistemic commitment within the profession was shown to be weak and characterized "cognitive authority fragility" (see Durocher & Gendron, 2014, p. 636;West, 2003, pp. 86-88).Durocher and Gendron (2014) stated that their study underlines important issues including the lack of professional CA, which gives cause to concerns on the professional status of accountancy and, further, raises the need "to reexamine society's views on professional work" (p.652).
The ethnographic study of Pollock and Williams (2015), in turn, pursued to empirically explore conceptual issues when a new form of expertise, namely industry analysts, was emerging in the Information Technology (IT) field.Instead of examining professional institutions as was typical in research on professionalization, the study looked at the content of expert work and knowledge.The notion of CA was applied to refer to the status of this new profession examined through the conduct of work and as the reputation associated with the company's brand.More specifically, CA was highlighted through the epistemic systems by which new types of expert knowledge were produced, validated, and consumed in interactions among a variety of actors, and also in relation to knowledge products offered for clients.The triangulated data of industry analysts of a major company and other players in the IT field were collected using participant observation, interviews, documents, and reports and qualitatively analyzed.The CA of these new professionals was, in addition to the efficacy of their work, interpreted as rooted in their ability to exercise authority, that was based on defensible knowledge and demonstration of their independence, over an entire technical field.Thus, it was claimed that industry analysts needed to establish CA, which also imparted some "public good" elements to their knowledge, to gain an audience for their expertise.Overall, Pollock and Williams (2015) suggest to renew the scholarship of professions to shift the focus from institutions and boundary work toward the content of expert work, its practices and knowledge. .Rosset's and Achermann's ( 2019) auto-ethnographic study focused on the access negotiation to Federal Administration/asylum agencies' country of origin information (COI) units in two European countries.Here CA referred to the monopoly of legitimate knowledge production about the field.The notion was defined as "… the capacity to impose meaning and knowledge differentials over a topic" (Lézé, 2008, p. 264, as cited in Rosset & Achermann, 2019, p. 51) and viewed as the core of related interactions and the power to produce legitimate knowledge about the field (Rosset & Achermann, 2019).The study was based on interviews, field notes, and emails exchanged during a negotiation process between a PhD student, a supervisor, and Officials of Federal Administration/asylum agencies' COI units.The PhD student's approach was planned to be based on constructivism to examine the migration and asylum procedures and policies, but access to the COI unit was denied.This was interpreted as a situated case of knowledge control as the access negation shifted to the researcher's competence, the field's situation, and the nature of legitimate knowledge-all related to politics of expertise and the COI units' legitimizing functions in the wider migration perspective.According to Rosset and Achermann (2019), the negation became a competition over CA and the monopoly of legitimate knowledge production about the field of practice understood as relying on "… a positivist epistemology assuming the existence of an external world made of objective facts that can be reported neutrally" (p.61).Hultgren (2013) examined CA in the context of information seeking practices, drawing from phenomenological sociology and narrative theory.Hultgren (2013), based in LIS, linked CA with Schutz's (1964) idea of a metaphor of the stranger to render visible the cultural patterns of social groups.The concept of CA was defined referring to Wilson (1983), who "… uses the term to signify the relationship between two people where one of them is regarded as an authority in some issue of interest to the other" (Hultgren, 2013, p. 279) and used to characterize accessible, trustworthy information gained from other people higher in the hierarchy of a social network and other sources perceived credible (Hultgren, 2013).The study was a single case study that focused on accounts constructed between a researcher and a university student with an immigrant background, who looked for information about a career and required education in her new home country.The qualitative content analysis highlighted the CA of a profession of interest, namely, a lawyer, pathways to that profession, credible information sources, that is, teachers as CAs, and CA related to work content, skills and knowledge held by professionals on the field but not by the student.Furthermore, Hultgren (2013) argued that information literacy emerged as a tool to reach an understanding of cultural codes and social expectations of the profession.Information literacy was further used to demonstrate an identity of national citizens of the new home country, a presumptive student and, further, "… mastering information seeking as a useful tool seemed to create a secure feeling of her own position, and the possibility of becoming more Swedish" (Hultgren, 2013, p. 291).Daoust and Malsch (2020) took a qualitative, interpretative approach to explore auditees' influence over staff auditors.The study originating from the field of economics/accounting made use of the notion of social power to conceptualize this influence and discussed the notion of CA in terms of expert knowledge as the sine qua non of professional work to provide CA to them.CA was aligned with Wilson's (1983, noted by citing Gorman & Sandefur, 2011) definition as "… the kind of authority that influences what people consciously recognize as valid or proper" (Daoust & Malsch, 2020, p. 1340).By citing Alvesson (2001), Daoust and Malsch (2020) further discussed the nature of CA as referring to professional expertise that is socially recognized by an audience and noted the aspect of knowledge asymmetry between professionals.Here the notion of CA was used to refer to auditees' expert knowledge of auditing techniques and was further linked with the notion of social capital that was developed while the auditees had been working in the field before entering the present company.These notions referred to the auditees' influence over auditors and to their power resources (i.e., expert knowledge and social capital) on which efficacy of their power was based in the auditing process.The empirical data were collected by triangulated interview data among auditees and auditors of large auditing companies.The analysis showed that auditees viewed themselves as being superior to auditors in their knowledge and insights, and the knowledge asymmetry between them increased if the auditee was a former employee of the auditing team.By relying on their own CA, the auditees employed three strategies to constrain auditors' operational independence: stagesetting, teaching, and questioning.It was indicated that the auditees' social capital could support two additional strategies: attracting and monitoring.The study's theoretical approach to power was seen to allow (re)position human agency at the heart of the conversation of independence and … contribute to moving the policy debates on auditors' independence from the questions of psychological forces to operational and more "political" questions of power struggles … in a change of distribution of resources in order to strengthen auditors' power during the audit engagement (Daoust & Malsch, 2020, p. 1364).
The most recent study in this final category comes from Mugnai (2022) and is based on actor-centered constructivism and originates from economics, politics, and international studies.Mugnai (2022) took a Constructivist Institutional perspective (Clift, 2021) to understand "the institutional, organizational, and ideological context" wherein European Central Bank's (ECB) economic ideas were developed (Clift, 2018, p. 27).Drawing from constructivist approaches within public policy research, policy problems and realities were considered in this study as socially constructed and, policy and political action shaped by ideas, collective understandings, and norms (Berman, 1998, as cited in Mugnai, 2022).From this perspective, policy actors and their rationality were understood as embedded into cognitive frames, which affected thinking and behavior.Mugnai (2022) argued that actor-centered constructivism considered both "the strategic interests of actors as well as their embeddedness in cognitive structures" (Saurugger, 2013, p. 892, as cited in Mugnai, 2022, p. 3).Here CA was not clearly defined, but the notion was used to refer to institutional authority noted as "… I contend that over time the ECB has mobilized its 'cognitive authority' to 'impress its interpretation of sound policy upon others', and instill its thinking into [European] economic policy debates (Clift, 2018, p. 1)" (Mugnai, 2022, p. 3).A case study (interviews, documents, and content analysis) focused on fiscal policy, structural reforms, and convergence to resilient economic structures, and applied the notion of bricolage, referring to a form of agency whereby parts of an existing whole were combined in new forms (Carstensen, 2011, as cited in Mugnai, 2022).The study concluded that … identifying and diagnosing the causes of political problems is a political process shaped by 'the construction of CA' (Broome & Seabrooke, 2012, p. 8), that is, 'an ongoing political struggle over the ideas and assumptions that guide the everyday practice of global governance' (ibid.)(Mugnai, 2022, p. 26).

| DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
This scoping review shows how the notion of CA has been understood and applied in empirical studies on human behavior and practices within LIS and neighboring fields during the past 25 years.The findings show the development of four parallel lines of research, which, while overlapping to some extent both in terms of their theoretical perspective and with regard to the methods used.In these parallel research strands, CA has been understood as 1.An indicator of information source quality 2. Discursively constructed 3. Situated in social mechanisms and settings, and 4. Institutional legitimacy of science and professions This body of research has extended and developed in parallel to Wilson's (1983) conceptual work by examining CA in different spheres of knowledge and at different levels, including individual, community, and societal perspectives.
At the individual level, CA has been approached from the perspective of cognitive processes in information seeking and searching, often to extend this understanding to benefit the design of information systems.Even though the research has targeted professionals or other groups, it has taken the individual and their cognitive processes or views as a starting point and as such, contributed to the understanding of CA judgments.This strand of research has evidently been inspired by the way Wilson (1983) characterizes the so-called external tests for evaluating CA including occupational specialization, formal education, reputation among peers, reputation among other CAs, and successful accomplishment.Moreover, extending the scope of research from so-called objective indicators of CA to cover social information seeking and informal sources, the studies have taken into account the ways CA can be built based on, for instance, personal trust and intrinsic plausibility (see Wilson, 1983).Moreover, increasingly, research has treated CA not only as established and recognized formal expertise but varying in different spheres of knowledge.
Community-level CA research has contributed to our understanding of the ways we collectively construct our understanding of information sources and their CA.This line of research has developed from examination of the ways CA is discursively constructed in language use to cover the ways that shared understandings are constructed also multimodally, and through our activities and material environments.CA has also been characterized as an element of a belief system, a small world, or a setting, showing how CAs are situated within a specific community or context.Moving in between of community and societal levels, CA has been examined as situated in the general social mechanisms with which humans interact with each other and approached from a legitimacy perspective, highlighting the role of CA in institutional relations and knowledge production.This research informs us about the ways in which CA is connected to power (see Savolainen, 2022) and being constantly negotiated both in communities and in wider political (see Bluemle, 2023) and societal contexts.
The first empirical CA studies by Rieh andBelkin (1998, 2000) and Rieh (2002Rieh ( , 2005) ) represent the individual level CA research and focused on Web information seeking and searching.This line of research has been applied, beyond LIS, in computer science and communication studies/sciences, has focused on the so-called external tests for credibility and quality, and informed information systems design.McKenzie's (2003) study on the discursive construction of CA began a parallel line of CA research, which has gained traction in LIS.Beyond information practice research, this constructionist research approach has informed conceptualizations of information literacy, as evidenced by the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ALA, 2015) framework for information literacy, where "Authority is Constructed and Contextual" is one of the central frames of information literacy.
In 2003, McKenzie stated that research had then, more than two decades ago, mainly considered CA from a constructivist perspective where CA decisions are seen to be the result of underlying cognitive processes, that is, based on the information seeker's interpretation of source characteristics in light of a body of stable beliefs and attitudes (McKenzie, 2003, p. 262).This constructivist perspective seems to now be in the minority while the constructionist perspective represents the more dominant line of research, which likely reflects to development of LIS as a whole (see Hartel, 2019).Overall, common to the different strands of research identified in this review is increased emphasis on social, affective, and contextual aspects of CA, the multimodality of its construction, and CA in the creation of knowledge and in learning and education.Notably, a considerable proportion of CA research has focused on information practices, seeking, and/or retrieval as part of scientific or professional practice and health.
While the majority of the CA research reviewed here represents LIS and related fields (computer science, communication sciences), it is noteworthy that the notion of CA has also been examined in other human and social sciences including sociology, psychology, health sciences, educational sciences, and economics.Interestingly, the first study included in this review (Kerr et al., 1997) is not an LIS study but represents sociological research.Overall, especially when examined at the societal level, the conceptualization of CA has been influenced by sociological theorization and concepts, which is understandable as the concept of authority has been central in the tradition of sociology (see, e.g., Weber, 1978).In most studies included in this review the notion of CA was defined on the basis of Wilson's (1983) seminal work, but especially in the research strand focusing on societal-level CA, other interpretations were found, the studies drawing from sociological and psychological theorization, for example.As such, the notion seems to allow for many interpretations and is adaptable to both different science philosophical perspectives and empirical contexts.
In contrast to earlier reviews on the concept of CA (Bluemle, 2023;Rieh, 2010;Savolainen, 2022), this scoping review extended its perspective beyond LIS, enabling the reflection of CA research in LIS to that conducted in neighboring fields.This examination highlights the unique perspective of LIS research and value of theorization developing within LIS.The present review is limited in its approach as it focused only on peer-reviewed, empirical articles published in scientific journals leaving out theoretical work as well as essays, book chapters, conference publications, and non-published work.As such, the findings of the review should not be interpreted as representative of all CA research.Moreover, since we wanted to focus on the exact notion of CA, related relevant research was not included in this review.
Future work can extend this review by addressing the mentioned gaps.In particular, examination of CA in relation to other authority conceptualizations, specifically that of epistemic authority (Croce, 2019) and work within the broader research area of social epistemology may prove fruitful.Wilson used the concept of CA, perhaps because he found little relevance of the philosophical writings on epistemic authority at the time (see Wilson, 1983) as they often highlighted epistemic autonomy, that is, reliance on one's own knowledge as superior to second-hand sources (Zagzebski, 2012).However, according to Croce (2019), research on epistemic authority has matured considerably during the past years and the concept has become central to social epistemology.Examining the parallels in conceptualizations of and empirical research on cognitive and epistemic authority are called for.
While the body of empirical research on CA is already notable, future research is warranted on all levels of CA operationalization, including individual, community, and societal levels, as well as their interactions.The notion of CA provides a unique way to simultaneously characterize the credibility and influence of information sources, but the latter mentioned element requires more attention; while impact is a central element in the notion of CA, in empirical work, it has often been backgrounded in comparison to credibility evaluation and construction.A qualitative, interpretative approach Mixed methods; data collection including observation, performance tasks, log data, think-aloud technique, and interviews; qualitative content analysis based on grounded theory by Strauss and Corbin (1994).15 university scholars.
CA referred to influences a user would recognize as proper as the information therein is thought to be credible and worthy of belief (Wilson, 1983), operationalized as the extent users think they can trust information (based on Rieh & Belkin, 1998, 2000;Wilson, 1983).
Identified six primary facets of CA: trustworthiness, reliability, scholarliness, credibility, officialness, and authoritativeness, showing trustworthiness to be the primary facet of CA in this context.Found the notions of CA and information quality to be firmly linked and both to potentially inform information system design.Fogg et al., 2001;Fritch & Cromwell, 2001;Katerattanakul & Siau, 1999;Rieh, 2002;Zhu & Gauch, 2000).(1983) as "influence on one's thoughts that one would recognize as proper" along with the six facets of CA by Rieh (2002).Rieh andBelkin (1998, 2000) also cited.
Showed that CA, indicated by its six facets (Rieh, 2002), was not commonly used as a quality indicator in predictive judgments of Web-based information sources by medical doctors, who, instead, relied on mental models of sites to judge information quality.These mental models were found to be constructed on the basis of both firsthand (past experience) and second-hand information (institutional, recommendations).

Perry (2018) LIS, USA
A qualitative case study approach; Mixed methods (pre-and post-tests in a lab related to oral and written instruction incl.critical evaluation of articles' content, perception of CA measured by the numeric value and words used to describe the articles) CA not clearly defined but described in connection to the concept of secondhand information and pointing to Wilson's (1983) , 2004).It is claimed that information seekers "select Web pages when there is some indication of source authority based on their own experience, other recommendations or something they have heard" (Rieh, 2005) but rather than ascribed CA to texts based on objective quality indicators, their "value and reputation are negotiated" (Sundin et al., 2008, p. 22).Notes that "Wilson [1983] was mainly concerned with whether or not users credit librarians as CAs" (p.188).
Showed how in an academic setting, CA of formal scientific and academic information sources is central and formal information seeking a vital part of the information practices of this setting.(1983), Chatman (1991), Rieh (2002), and Olaisen (1990).
Showed how more faith can be placed in first-hand knowledge produced within a small-world whereas secondhand knowledge from outside sources can be subjected to more critical analysis, highlighting the significance of one's own reflection and situational sensitiveness.Characterizes CA referring to Tuominen et al. (2002) argumentation for a social constructionist approach to CA stating that communities create the notion of CA through discourse (Jordan, 1997;Oliphant, 2009).The notion of "communal CA" is used to refer to community of Web users' retrieval habits.
Showed how online discussion boards and social networking sites can be seen as useful sources of peer-support rather than authoritative sources of educational information, highlighting the situatedness of CA.Characterizes CA as a notion that "helps in conceptualizing how people and cultural tools shape and are shaped by credibility assessments" (p.6), pointing to how credibility assessment are constructed and negotiated in relation to a specific social setting and mediated through cultural tools (Wertsch, 1998), CA being one such tool.Referring to Wilson (1983) argues that "… beyond people's own experience, everything they know about the world is mediated to them by others.… When assessing credibility of second-hand knowledge, one cultural tool in this situation is, if the information originates from a CA." Shows how a number of cultural tools can be used when evaluating information credibility (evaluation of language use and writing style, other members' experience, expertise, and similarity, and their own education) when the source is considered as acceptable of personal rather than professional knowledge and how others can be seen as CAs based on either their expertise or their experience.(1983), further describing it as "justifiable influence that an information source has upon a person's understanding" and to illustrate "how the people and the objects that are at the center of information literacy practices are accorded influence" and viewing CA as an outcome of embodied expertise (Lloyd, 2012) and as produced through discursive action (McKenzie, 2003).Jordan (1997) also cited.
Shows how CA illustrates the role that knowledgeable people and objects play within information literacy practice, highlighting the recognition that information literacy centers on a negotiation of the ways in which communities legitimize (and devalue) knowledge structures rather than merely on the recognition of specialist expertise.Exemplifies how information literacy practices are constrained as well as enabled through the actions of CAs and how CAs create a route from the periphery to the center of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

F
I G U R E 2 Studies by publication year in categories representing parallel strands of CA research over a 25-year period.F I G U R E 3 Categories and subcategories representing strands of CA research.

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I G U R E 7 Studies included in the fourth strand of CA research.
Such authority may be defined as follows: alter is said to be a CA for ego if ego believes that he should be influenced by what alter holds to be the case, at least within some demarcated realm." Downloaded from https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.24942by University Of Oulu, Wiley Online Library on [27/08/2024].See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions)on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License