QLC120: Making of a Culture Icon

There are various checklists librarians and others have created for evaluating information (you may have heard of the CRAAP Test).

However, evaluating news stories, social media posts, and other content you find online or IRL requires a different strategy than what you may have learned before.

Rather than just looking at the information itself, use the SIFT Method described below to learn more about the source of the information to determine whether it's worth spending the time to analyze the information further to determine whether it's credible.

For more information, check out our guide to combatting misinformation on social media.

S.I.F.T.-- Fact Checking Like a Pro

STOP

Do you know the website or source of information? Check your bearings and consider your purpose. 

INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE

Know the expertise and agenda of your source. Look up your source in Wikipedia. Consider what other sites say about your source. Open multiple tabs and explore. 

FIND TRUSTED COVERAGE

Look for the best information on a topic, or scan multiple sources to find out what the consensus is. Use Ctrl + F to find specific words. 

TRACE TO THE ORIGINAL

Find the original source to see the context, so you can decide if the version you have is accurately presented. 

At this stage in your academic career, evaluating scholarly sources requires less work than evaluating other types of information. This is because scholarly sources are created for audiences with more specialized knowledge than what you're likely to have at this point.

This doesn't mean that every academic journal article is appropriate for your research, so here are some questions to consider when evaluating scholarly sources:

• Is the source relevant to your needs?
  • Consider the argument you're trying to make and whether this particular source is the most effective support for it.
• Is the article peer-reviewed?
  • Peer-review is a process where other experts in a field review an article before it is published in a scholarly journal to make sure the author conducted adequate research for the conclusions they drew.
  • Peer-reviewed articles are generally considered the highest standard for credible sources for academic research.
  • If the article is not peer-reviewed, look up the author and publisher to see whether they have expertise on the topic they're writing about.
• Is the source current enough for your needs?
  • This depends on the nature of your topic, but an article from the late 1900s is probably not the most useful if your topic is a musician who went viral on TikTok.

The number one rule for reading a scholarly article is that you don't have to read every word of every article that seems like it might be relevant. Follow these steps or check out the video below to learn how you can efficiently read scholarly articles for your research:

1. Read the abstract.
   1. If the abstract isn't relevant, skip this article.
   2. If it seems relevant, read the discussion/conclusion.
2. Read the discussion/conclusion.
   1. If the article no longer seems relevant, skip it and move to the next one.
   2. If the article still seems relevant, read the introduction
3. Read the introduction.
   1. Note any potentially relevant literature that you might want read on your own.
4. Skim (or skip) the methods and results sections
   1. You're not expected to understand the specifics about how data was collected and analyzed, but if something doesn't make sense, take note.
5. Skim the bibliography to see if there is other potentially relevant literature you might want to read on your own.