Believing in Credibility Measures: Reviewing Credibility Measures in Media Research From 1951 to 2018

Although credibility has been a key concept in communication research for decades, there still is no consensus on its conceptualization and measurement. Indeed, scholars have criticized the lack of theory-driven approaches, conceptual inconsistencies between subconstructs of credibility, and the problems of applying them to the contemporary media environment. This literature review of quantitative studies of credibility published between 1951 and 2018 explores state-of-the-art definitions and measures of credibility (N = 259). While most studies make a conceptual distinction between source, media, and message credibility, measurement scales do not follow this traditional trinity. Instead, we propose moving toward a dual-credibility model.