Which are the TOP500 most popular sites?

Among popular science news sites, which ones do academics find the most credible?

• Ones like ScienceDaily, EurekAlert, ScienceNOW, nytimes, PhysOrg, http://Wired.com, etc... None of them match the original research articles. But on the other hand, when I'm writing up Quora posts, I'd probably prefer to link to a science news article - because it's more easily digestible for readers, and also because they aren't paywalled. I'm inclined to trust EurekAlert and ScienceNOW the most simply because they're made by the AAAS. But on the other hand, other sites often do the delivery better.

• Answer:

  You've named a lot of the major outlets without a paywall. If you can take partial paywalls, New Scientist and Scientific American are pretty engaging if not always the most "credible." Some research bloggers are more consistently trustworthy than major outlets, and every field has its own stars. A few examples I like are Not Exactly Rocket Science (Ed Yong) for biology/psych, BPS Psychology Digest (Christian Jarrett) for psych, and Language Log (Mark Liberman) for linguistics. You might like to cross-reference this question: