LibGuides: Getting Started with Research: SIFT: Evaluate Web Sources

SIFT

S-I-F-T

SIFT stands for:

STOP Ask yourself:
- Do you recognize the information source? Do you know anything about the website's reputation?
INVESTIGATE the source:
- Identify where this information comes from.
- Check for previous work: Has someone already fact-checked the claim or analyzed the research?
- Consider the creator's expertise and agenda. Is this source worth your time? (For example, a company that sells health food products is not the best source for information about health benefits/risks of consuming coconut oil. A research study funded by a pharmaceutical company is also suspect.)
- Read laterally: Look at what others have said about the source and about its claim.
  - Look on snopes.com or politifact.com or factcheck.org

Look for information about a website from other sources. Watch the videos below for tips on how.
- Look up the website or organization on Wikipedia. Look for other sources that verify or discredit the claim.

FIND trusted coverage
- Sometimes it's less important to know about the source and more importance to assess their claim.
- Compare information across sources. Determine whether there appears to be a consensus.
- By Google searching a claim and getting a story from a news source that has a verification process in place you not only verify the claim, but you end up with a better story to share with others. We call this "trading up." The idea behind trading up is that you can use things like social media to discover stories relevant to you, but when you find the stories, take a moment to "zoom out" and get the best reporting or analysis on it, rather than simply reading the specific article that happens to find its way to you. Watch this in action in the video below, as Caulfield attempts to "trade up" and find trusted coverage on suspicious Coronavirus claims found on social media: https://youtu.be/zvkZSemR_UU
TRACE claims, quotes, and media back to the original context.
- Sometimes online information has been removed from its original context (for example, a news story is reported on in another online publication or an image is shared on Twitter).
- Go upstream to the source: Is this the original source of the information? Or is this a re-publication or interpretation of previously published work? Are you examining the original source? If not, trace back to it.