Serving the Community College of Vermont & Vermont State University
Serving the Community College of Vermont & Vermont State University
The SIFT method outlines four moves that you can use to quickly check the reliability of information. While the focus is on online resources, it can be applied to any information that you want to verify. Rather than being a checklist of things to look for, it focuses on habits that you can use to save your energy for digging deeper. The goal is to understand the information's context so that you can evaluate it effectively.
STOPWhen you encounter new information or a new resource, stop and take your bearings. Ask yourself: Do I know and trust this website? If not, use the other moves to learn more about it before you read or share.
You also want to stop periodically while you work through the moves to make sure you haven't gone down a rabbit hole. Remember, these strategies are meant to be fairly quick. If it's taking you a long time, check your strategy and make sure it's working.
Find information about the source from other sources. Ask questions like:
Investigating a source can help you contextualize the information and uncover hidden biases. You want to know if the economics article you're reading was written by a Nobel laureate economist. You also want to know if the video you're watching about the health benefits of milk was put out by the dairy industry. It isn't because the Nobel prize winner is always right about everything or because you can never trust the dairy industry, but knowing that context impacts how you are going to approach the information.
Sometimes the article or video you found doesn't matter as much as the claim it's making. In that case, choose some keywords to search. If it's a current event, try using the news filter on your search engine.
Knowing whether a claim is widely accepted or still hotly debated provides more context for you to use as you evaluate it.
Track the facts or data back to the original source to make sure they weren't taken out of context. Some things to consider:
The context in which something happened or information was created influences its meaning, but many things online are taken out of context for a variety of reasons. Understanding that original context will help you evaluate your information effectively.
When you investigate a source, you don't want to rely only on what the creators tell you about themselves. You want to know what other sources say about them before you continue. Professional fact-checkers use a simple strategy called lateral reading to quickly and accurately determine the reliability of a source in just a few steps:
Doing this helps you determine who is really behind the information you've found, which is key to evaluating and analyzing it.
The SIFT Method portion of this guide was adapted from "Check, Please!" (Caulfield). The canonical version of Check, Please! exists at http://lessons.checkplease.cc and licensed under CC-BY. As the authors of the original version have not reviewed any other copy's modifications, the text of any site not arrived at through the above link should not be sourced to the original authors.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
