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Evaluating Online Sources A Guide Lateral Reading

Bonisiwe Shabane
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evaluating online sources a guide lateral reading

Lateral reading is searching for information about a source while reading it. The concept originated out of research from the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) under Sam Wineburg, the founder and executive director and is used by professional fact checkers. This video from the Stanford History Education Group explains it well. The short video from the Stanford History Education Group illustrates the importance of click restraint and why you shouldn’t assume that the first search results are necessarily the most reliable or relevant ones. Use the criteria below to help you evaluate a source. Keep in mind:

© 2023 University of St. Thomas, Minnesota CC-BY-NC-SA This guide was created by Andrea Baer and Dan Kipnis at Rowan University and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA). The Internet allows people to create and to share information in ways that once seemed possible only in science fiction. At the same time that we can benefit from the open nature of the Internet, it's sometimes hard to decide what online information to trust and to use. We'll offer some simple, evidence-based strategies for evaluating the credibility of online sources, as well as reading critically.

More specifically, we’ll teach you about “lateral reading,” the practice of doing a quick initial evaluation of a website by spending little time on the website and more time reading what others say about... Lateral reading is used commonly by fact checkers. These strategies will help you look beyond less important surface features of a web source (for example, how professional it looks or if it's a .org), and think more carefully about who is behind... On this page we’ll introduce you to several lateral reading strategies and concepts. On the guide’s other pages (see the navigation menu) we’ll share additional source evaluation strategies and learning resources. When investigating a website or other online source, don't trust what the website says about itself.

Instead, get off the website, open up a new tab, and see what other authoritative sources have said about the site. Please watch the short video [3:33] below to learn how lateral reading works in practice. In 2017, a group of researchers in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University conducted a study in which they asked fact checkers, PhD historians, and Stanford undergraduates to examine the websites of... Each group was asked to evaluate the trustworthiness of the two organizations. All of the fact-checkers were able to determine that the American Academy of Pediatrics was the legitimate professional organization, while the American College of Pediatricians was actually a cloaked hate group with a hidden... Only 50% of the historians, and 20% of the Stanford undergraduates were able to identify the Academy as the legitimate professional organization.

The researchers suggest that the fact-checkers were able to sniff out the cloaked hate group because they didn't just stay on the organizations' websites. They opened new browser tabs and searched for information about each group using Google and Wikipedia. The historians and undergraduates, however, mostly stayed on each organization's website, read the "about" section, and looked for things like misspellings and banner ads to determine trustworthiness. So-called "fake news" websites and organizations with a hidden agenda are getting very good at deception, and, in order to be responsible Internet users, we need to be more vigilant about verifying our sources. One strategy that we can use is "lateral reading." Good lateral readers use the simple techniques of the fact-checkers in the Stanford study example. If you would like a detailed explanation of how lateral reading works, please watch the video below.

For more information, please see: Wineburg, Sam and McGrew, Sarah, Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information (October 6, 2017). Stanford History Education Group Working Paper No. 2017-A1 . Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3048994 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3048994 CC-BY-NC-SA Most information on this page was adapted from the tutorial Evaluating Online Sources through Lateral Reading created by Andrea Baer and Dan Kipnis at Rowan University and is licensed under a Creative Commons... "The Surgeon General’s Community Toolkit for Addressing Health Misinformation provides specific guidance and resources for health care providers, educators, librarians, faith leaders, and trusted community members to understand, identify, and stop the spread of...

The following videos from Mike Caulfield, who has done a lot of work on evaluating and fact-checking online sources, provide an overview of what lateral reading is and some suggestions on how to do... This first video illustrates the importance of evaluating sources through something called “lateral reading” (when evaluating a website, looking at what others have said about that page, rather than relying primarily on what the... The second video provides a simple demonstration on how to put lateral reading into action. NOTE: Many new or contentious topics may require more work than the example shown here. Learn how to evaluate sources by "reading laterally." Lateral reading is when you look outside of your source to seek additional information about a source's credibility, reputation, funding sources, and biases.

When looking at an unfamiliar source, open a new browser tab and search for information about that source. Learn how to read laterally by applying the strategies below to your evaluation. This guide and infographic by UW-Green Bay Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Library Hours Call 864.592.4764 Text 864.756.8008 Ask a Question Make an Appointment When you find a source and want to figure out if it is a credible source, you may be tempted to read through the full article to figure out if the source is credible. This process (called reading vertically) can be time-consuming and does not give a full indication of how credible this source is.

Reading laterally is a skill used by professional fact-checkers that helps them quickly review a source and determine whether that source is credible or not. This means that instead of staying on the webpage to determine if the source is credible, lateral reading encourages you to leave the webpage and use other webpages to decide if a source is... Check out the below video from Stanford History Education Group to learn more about lateral reading. This article from The Weather Channel published in 2015 shows pictures of daisies, which have mutated as a result of exposure to radiation from the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. Let's say you wanted to determine the credibility of this article using lateral searching. Do you have a strong reaction to the information you see (e.g., joy, pride, anger)?

If so, slow down before you share or use that information. We tend to react quickly and with less thought to things that evoke strong feelings. By pausing, you give your brain time to process your initial response and to analyze the information more critically. Then you are better able to make use of the "Four Moves" described above. Online Verification Skills - Video 1 (Newswise) Online Verification Skills - Video 2: Investigate the Source (Newswise)

CC-BY-NC-SA This guide was created by Andrea Baer and Dan Kipnis at Rowan University and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA). Lateral reading is "the act of verifying what you're reading as you're reading it" (Heich, 2020). As you read, you should know the context of what you are reading; who wrote it, and what position they wrote it from. The idea of lateral reading comes from a web-based perspective, where you should be opening tabs (lateral to the one you are reading), to verify information as you go. We can rely on the resource we are reading solely to verify the information within, we have to check it against other sources. Consider the prompts and questions from the ADLER Test when considering whether or not to use an article in your research.

Adapted from Microsoft Co-Pilot GPT 4.0.

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