A small rant about sources in non-fiction books

I’ve only started reading non-fiction books about half a year ago, so keep in mind that my sample size is small. I’m not sure if I simply had very wrong expectations for the genre but why is it ,that many non-fiction books, claiming to be serious and informative fail when it comes to listing their sources?

Some authors don’t even bother to include a list at all. How are we readers supposed to trust the arguments presented in the book or dig deeper if we have no idea where your information comes from?

Then there are the books that do include a list of sources but don’t bother to link them clearly to the text. Instead of notes or footnotes, we’re left with a vague, generic bibliography at the end. Who is supposed to figure out which of the 57 sources supports your claim on page 92? Should we just assume everything is true because you threw in some sources at the end?

Or there are super lazy citations that feel even more annoying. I don’t know how often I tried to copy a link just to learn that it doesn’t work anymore. Or the citation reads like “Richard, 2001,”. If I was interested in detective work, I’d read a murder mystery, not your half-baked bibliography.

And if you actually manage to find the source it often turns out that the study is questionable. A study that surveyed 12 people from one neighborhood in 1987 is not a solid foundation for anything. I just started reading: „Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men“. The major point of the book is that we lack good unbiased data and this makes the decisions we make on this data biased. Yet when I tried to find two of the mentioned studies the very first thing I found was an article criticizing that the study I was looking for was never published in any way. We just have a claim from the company. Great, now I feel like the entire point of the book is undermined. And I’m too lazy to fact check every single other mentioned study in the book. I’m not a university professor and I’m not getting paid for fact checking an entire book.

The lack of proper citations isn’t just lazy—it’s disrespectful to us reader. We invest our time in reading the book and we trust that the author did their research. And that someone in the publishing company did their work to check the sources. Aren't they supposed to do that? I know it's not academia but I always thought it would be someones job there to check the studies mentioned in the books.

Is this a big problem in the entire genre or am I just reading the wrong books?