Online Research

The SIFT method is a quick strategy you can use to help you analyze and evaluate information, especially news or other online media. 

The first move of SIFT is easy. All you need to do is stop - before you share a video, click a link shared on social media, click an article, or have a strong immediate emotional response to a headline.

Ask yourself:

• Do I know this website or the person behind this information source? 
• Do I know it's reputation?
• Does it make sense to look into this source, or try to find a better source for the same story?

This is a particularly important step, considering what we know about the attention economy. Your attention equals profits for social media platforms, news organizations, websites and other digital platforms. Many of these platforms have found that the best way to keep us "engaged" through comments, reactions, shares, likes and time spent on content is through sensational, divisive, or outrage-inducing content.

Stopping encourages you to protect your attention and give it to sources strategically and thoughtfully.

Before moving forward, use the other three moves: Investigate the Source, Find Better Coverage, and Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media back to the Original Context.

Knowing who is behind a source of information and what their reputation is can help you determine if you want to engage with or use the source. For example, if you find out that the organization behind a website is heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry, you likely wouldn't trust what they have to say about electric vehicles.

Before you engage with a source, see what others are saying about the author, publisher, creator or website. 

• Use Google or Wikipedia to investigate a news organization or other resource
• To look up academic authors, search for their name on Google Scholar to find their publications, or google their name along with the name of the institution they work for to find out more about their area of expertise 
• Hovering is another technique to learn more about who is sharing information, especially on social media platforms such as Twitter.

Want to learn more about how to investigate a source? Check out these supplementary videos:

• CTRL-F's Skill: Just Add Wikipedia - see additional demonstrations of how using Wikipedia to investigate a source 
• CTRL-F's: Evaluating Expertise -  learn more about evaluating the expertise behind a source

Sometimes you're interested in a particular claim or story, not who is sharing it. Or, you may not be able to find out much about who shared a source. Rather than spending a lot of time trying to figure out who is sharing a claim, you can instead try to find better coverage. 

You can do this by: 

• Checking to see what other websites are sharing the topic by doing a Google search for the claim. Look for the story or claim shared by a trusted website, news organization or other source, or look until you can find a source that you can investigate the source's reputation.
• Use fact-checking sites to see if others have looked into a claim.

Very often, claims and news stories are recycled through multiple different sources. For example, CBC might be the first to report on an event or issue, and shortly afterwards, several news outlets will publish their own articles about the same story, mentioning the CBC article. 

It's best to look for the original story when possible, so you can interpret and analyze it in its original context. 

To trace claims, quotes and media back to their original source:

• Click through to follow links to claims
• Open up the original reporting sources listed in a bibliography if present
• Do a reverse image search to find the original context in which an image was shared. Very often images and videos are shared to social media outside of their original context, to provide 'evidence' to support false claims.