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SIFT: Evaluating Sources Online: Move 3: Find Better Coverage

SIFT is a quick and simple approach that can be applied to all sorts of sources, from scholarly articles to social media posts to memes, that will help you judge the quality of the information you're looking at.

Move 3: FIND BETTER COVERAGE

There are times when we find the perfect source right away. More often than not, though, this doesn't happen: the source may not be of high quality, or you can't decide whether you should use it or not, or the source might not have anything in it that's actually useful to you. 

This is where Move 3 comes in! By Finding Better Coverage, you may have a better chance of determining the reliability of the information you're using. 

Below is a video (4:28) explaining this process in more detail.

Search Strategy: Click Restraint

Click restraint is a term introduced by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew to describe a behavior skilled fact-checkers demonstrate that less skilled people do not. Fact-checkers scan multiple results to try and find the particular result that combines trustworthiness with relevance before they click, often visiting the second page of search results.

Learn more about click restraint by watching the video above.

Search Strategy: Reverse Image Search

Often claims or stories will come to you in the form of images. If you want to find trusted coverage of the issue, claim, or photo, you have a couple options:

  • You can search on some relevant text from the image or a description of the image, OR
  • You can use reverse image search. The video above shows you how to do this in Google Chrome, but other browsers have similar methods.

Attribution

Note: This SIFT method guide was adapted from Michael Caulfield's "Check, Please!" course. The canonical version of this course exists at http://lessons.checkplease.cc. The text and media of this site, where possible, is released into the CC-BY, and free for reuse and revision.