
Image from Mike Caulfield used via CC BY 4.0 license.
Another method for verifying information's credibility is SIFT. SIFT is a way to quickly check about the trustworthiness of a source and find alternative sources of information. This is an especially good method for identifying misinformation on the web.
Stop
First, stop and ask yourself a few questions:
- Are you familiar with the source of this information, such as the author(s), the journal, the website, etc.?
- Do you know if the source has a good reputation? Do you trust that reputation?
If you don't know their reputation and trust them, it's time to look into more detail about the source.
Investigate the Source
If you aren't familiar with a source, you'll need to learn more about it to see if you should trust its credibility.
- Search for information from other sources to learn about the reputation of your source.
- If you're looking up an author, don't just look at their personal page; and if you're looking up a website, don't just look at their "About" page. You want to see their reputation with others, not how they want to promote themselves.
- You can do this for websites by using a "negative site search", where instead of searching just a website you search everything except that website. For example, to learn about the page minimumwage.com on Google without looking at that page, you could search "minimumwage.com -site:minimumwage.com" using the minus sign to remove that site from your search results.
- If you still don't know if you trust the source, then see if you can verify the information from a source you do trust.
Find Better Coverage
- If you aren't sure whether to trust a source, or you just need reliable information from any source, then try to find a more credible source covering the same information.
- You should expect a topic to be covered by a number sources. Doing another search and checking multiple sources of coverage should help. If you see at lot of coverage saying the same thing, it's probably true. If there isn't other reporting making the same claim, it could be false. And if you find a lot of coverage, but it disagrees, you can presume this is a disputed topic.
- When finding better coverage, it can be helpful if you can find the original source of a piece of information.
Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to the Original Context
- Often, when searching online, you find information disconnected from its original context: quotes without information about where it originated, images without information on where it was taken and who took it, and arguments without any evidence.
- The further information gets from its original source, the more it changes (like the telephone game). Getting back to the original context will help you evaluate credibility.
- If there are links back to where a source found their information, follow those links to see find the original source and evaluate that.
- If there are no links to the original source, try to find the original context:
- Long quotes can be searched in Google using quotation marks.
- You can find where else an image has been used online using Google reverse image search.
- Try to find other coverage of the same topic. See if someone has already debunked or confirmed the source information.