Lateral reading and SIFT are two strategies that provide a framework for evaluating websites. These strategies are a bit newer than CRAAP and are intended to give actionable steps to evaluate sources.

Lateral Reading

This is the process of finding information on a website by looking for additional information on the author and the site by using sites that are already known to be trustworthy. These strategies are used by professional fact-checkers to verify information.

Steps:

  • Open a new Internet tab in your browser
  • Search for the author, organization, or site name (depending on what is available)
    • Use fact-checking sites likes Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck, or even Wikipedia (specifically the citations they provide!)
    • Check credible news sources
  • Find out what other sites, news sources, and commenters say about say about the author, organization, or site

SIFT

The acronym stands for Stop, Investigate, Trace, and Claim.

  • STOP – before you start searching, think about what you are looking for and the information you need
    • When you find a site, take a minute to evaluate whether you know the source before trusting it
  • INVESTIGATE – take 60 seconds to learn more about the source by looking at the About Us section and running on a search on the author or organization affiliated with the page
  • FIND – look for additional, reputable sources making the same claim as the new source you found
  • TRACE – for any claims or quotes, find the original instance and evaluate the context; is anything being misrepresented?

Additional Resources