Evaluating Non-Scholarly Sources
As discussed in the previous chapter, non-scholarly resources have seldom undergone peer review. Researchers using non-scholarly resources need to independently evaluate the credibility of each source. Non-scholarly resources may include social media, online news articles, magazine articles, books, and blog posts. Each source may have its own strengths, but the way it is created may impact its credibility, accuracy, and bias. What other non-scholarly resources can you think of? Why might they best help answer you research questions? What challenges to the credibility of the source do you need to keep in consideration?
When you want to fact-check a story or claim, you can quickly do so by using this method developed by Mike Caulfield at Washington State University Vancouver. It’s called SIFT, and consists of the following four steps: Stop, Investigate the Source, Find Trusted Coverage, and Trace claims, quotes, and media to their original context. Read more about each of those steps below.
Stop. When you first hit a page or post and start to read, ask yourself whether you know the website or source of the information, and what the reputation of both the claim and the website is. If you don’t have that information, use the other moves to get a sense of what you’re looking at. After you begin to use the other moves it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole, going off on tangents only distantly related to your original task. Keep your research question in mind, and focus on the reasons motivating your information search.
Investigate the Source. Researchers should know who has written/posted/shared/researched the information before they engage with it. Find out where the information is coming from so that you know what you are reading before you read it. Knowing the source and agenda will help interpret what they are saying. Take sixty seconds to figure out where media is from before reading will help you decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you better understand its significance and trustworthiness.
Find Trusted Coverage. Sometimes you don’t care about the particular article or video that reaches you. You care about the claim the article is making. You want to know if it is true or false. You want to know if it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement. Your best bet might not be to investigate the source, but to go out and find the best source you can on this topic, or, just as importantly, to scan multiple sources and see what the expert consensus seems to be. In these cases we encourage you to “find other coverage” that better suits your needs — more trusted, more in-depth, or maybe just more varied. Understanding the context and history of a claim will help you better evaluate it and form a starting point for future investigation.
Trace back to the original context. Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. What was clipped out of a video and what stayed in? Maybe there’s a picture that seems real but the caption could be misleading. Maybe a claim is made about a new medical treatment based on a research finding — but you’re not certain if the cited research paper really said that. In these cases you will want to trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you can see it in it’s original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented. You can search Twitter, Youtube, Google Images, and other places to track the original source of a piece of media and compare it to the context in which you found it. It can look quite different in different contexts.