Evaluating Sources: Lateral Reading and SIFT

Professional fact-checkers do not judge a website by how it looks. They leave it and check what others say about it. This lesson teaches you their fast, practical method.

What the research found

• The Stanford History Education Group studied 10 professional fact-checkers, 10 PhD historians and 25 Stanford undergraduates as they evaluated real websites (Stanford News, 2017).
• The fact-checkers were the fastest and most accurate. Historians and students were often fooled by professional-looking logos, scholarly-sounding references and non-profit web addresses.
• In one task, fact-checkers quickly worked out that one paediatrics organisation was a much smaller advocacy group with a particular agenda, while most students rated its site as more reliable than that of a major medical association.
• Professor Sam Wineburg said traditional website checklists "fit the web circa 2001". Looking at the page itself is not enough.

Lateral reading

• Reading vertically means staying on one site and judging it by its own "About us" page, design and claims.
• Reading laterally means quickly scanning the site, then opening new tabs to search for what other, trusted sources say about it.
• Search the organisation or author's name plus words like "funding", "criticism" or "who runs".
• Practise click restraint: do not click the first search result. Scan the whole results page first and choose the most trustworthy-looking source (Civic Online Reasoning).
• An encyclopedia entry, such as Wikipedia, can be a quick way to get an overview of who an organisation is, even if you would not cite it in an essay.

SIFT: the four moves

• S: Stop. Before you read deeply or share, ask whether you know the website and the claim. Remember why you are looking: a casual check and serious research need different amounts of effort.
• I: Investigate the source. Spend about sixty seconds finding out who is behind it, their expertise and their agenda. Mike Caulfield notes that expertise does not guarantee correctness, and having an agenda does not automatically make a source dishonest.
• F: Find better coverage. If the claim matters more than this particular article, look for trusted reporting on the same claim and see what the expert consensus is.
• T: Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context. Clipped videos, misleading captions and misreported research findings are common.

Putting it into practice

• Example: a site called something like "Global Institute for Healthy Teens" says a supplement improves focus. Stop. Investigate: search the name plus "funding" and discover it is run by the supplement's maker. Find better coverage: check NHS or other health authority guidance on the supplement. Trace: find whether the study they cite exists and what it actually measured.
• For school or university work, prefer sources with clear authors, editors, references and accountability: universities, government bodies, established publishers and peer-reviewed journals.
• For news, compare at least two reputable outlets from different countries or viewpoints, especially on international events.
• A .org address, a professional design or many citations do not on their own prove a site is reliable.