Rainbow, textured facade, mimicking the appearance of cloth books on a shelf

There’s a theme that runs through all of these fact-checking moves: They are about reconstructing the necessary context to verify, understand, and interpret sources of information that we may encounter in academic, professional, and personal research.

One piece of context is the author or publisher. What’s their expertise? What’s their agenda? This will require investigating the source.

When it comes to claims, a key piece of context includes whether they are accepted or contested. By scanning for other coverage, you can see what the consensus is on a claim and perhaps find a better source.

Finally, when evidence is presented through a certain lens—whether a quote or an image or a scientific finding—sometimes it helps to reconstruct the original context in which the evidence was presented.

In some cases these techniques will show you that claims are false, or that sources are misleading or even deceptive. But in the majority of cases they do something just as important: They reestablish the context that the web so often strips away, allowing for more meaningful engagement with information.


Sources

Image: “Rainbow Frequency” by Ricardo Gomez Angel is in the Public Domain, CC0

Text adapted from “SIFT (The Four Moves)” by Mike Caulfield, licensed under CC BY 4.0

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Introduction to College Research Copyright © by Walter D. Butler; Aloha Sargent; and Kelsey Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.