Library Guides Evaluating Resources and Misinformation The SIFT Method
Library Guides Evaluating Resources and Misinformation The SIFT Method
This library guide presents Mike Caulfield's SIFT method as a four-step routine for evaluating claims before accepting or sharing them. The guide opens with an infographic — that visual mnemonic is part of the method's design, not decoration, because SIFT is meant to be recalled under time pressure.
Stop
The first move is not to do anything. The guide frames Stop as an interruption to emotional and automatic response. Headlines are designed to provoke a reaction, and that reaction can bypass verification entirely. The stop is an explicit pause: acknowledge the impulse, resist it, check first.
Investigate the Source
Before reading a piece deeply, find out who made it and what their reputation is. The guide's fastest technique is the Wikipedia speed lookup: search the publication or organization name plus the word "wikipedia." This usually yields a quick context read in under thirty seconds — enough to know whether the source has a known bias, a contested history, or an explicit agenda, before committing time to reading it.
The guide's clearest example is the name-confusion trap. The American College of Pediatricians sounds like the American Academy of Pediatrics, but one is the mainstream professional organization and the other is a small advocacy group with a stated anti-LGBT position. Searching "American College of Pediatricians wikipedia" resolves the confusion in seconds. Without that step, a credentialed-sounding name can pass as clinical authority.
The guide also recommends hovering over links in social media before clicking to see the actual destination URL — a micro-move that catches misleading anchor text before a click reinforces an impression.
Find Better Coverage
Often the question is not "is this source reliable?" but "is this claim true?" The guide pushes readers toward independent lateral verification before committing to any one outlet's version of a story. Search for additional reporting and look for convergence or divergence among sources that have no common interest in agreeing. It recommends established fact-checking sites — FactCheck.org, Snopes, the Washington Post Fact Checker, and PolitiFact — as reference points for viral claims.
Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to the Original Context
The final step applies to stories that cite external evidence. Re-reporting frequently strips qualifications, cherry-picks statistics, and uses images from unrelated events. An image from one event can be presented as belonging to a different one. A statistic can be technically accurate but selected to imply a trend its original paper specifically warned against. Tracing means following a citation back to the primary source to check what it actually says in context.
The Evidence Behind It
The guide closes with research that shows the gap between lateral and vertical evaluation. Professional fact-checkers studied at Stanford spent just 3.5 seconds scanning a page before opening new tabs to investigate the source externally — and identified the more reliable source correctly 100 percent of the time. Stanford students, reading the same sources vertically, chose the less reliable source 65 percent of the time, including in one case preferring a hate group's site over an established organization because it looked more polished.
Worth coming back to: SIFT's power is sequential. Each move interrupts a different failure mode — emotional reaction, name familiarity, single-source trust, decontextualized fragments — and the order matters.
Sources
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