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Wellesley College Research Guides

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The Sift Method for Evaluating Information

 

S.I.F.T: Evaluate Information in a Digital World

Fact Check your Feed

  • Stop
    • Do you know the website or source of information? Start with a plan. Check your bearings and consider what you want to know and your purpose. Usually, a quick check is enough. Sometimes you'll want a deep investigation to verify all claims made and check all the sources.
  • Investigate the Source
    • Know the expertise and agenda of your source so you can interpret it. Look up your source in Wikipedia. Consider what other sites say about your source. A fact checking site may help. Read carefully and consider while you click. Open multiple tabs.
  • Find trusted coverage
    • Find trusted reporting or analysis, look for the best information on a topic, or scan multiple sources to see what consensus is. Find something more in-depth and read about more viewpoints. Look beyond the first few results, use Ctrl + F, and consider the URL. Even if you don't agree with the consensus, it will help you investigate further.
  • Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context
    • Trace claims, quotes and media back to the source. What was clipped out of a story/photo/video and what happened before or after? When you read the research paper mentioned in a news story, was it accurately reported? Find the original source to see the context, so you can decide if the version you have is accurately presented.

STOP, INVESTIGATE, FIND, TRACE

Contact me with questions: Annie Z-K annie@uoregon.edu

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Shared under a CC-BY-NC-SA license

Finding Books in SuperSearch

To find all books, check off the eBooks and Books options in the Source Types filter on the left side of the SuperSearch results page.

Finding Books in the Library Catalog

Use the Title Search to find a book whose title you know. The tages underneath each result can tell you whether the book is avaiable electronically or on the shelf in the library.

Finding Book Reviews in SuperSearch

Scroll to the Source Types filter in SuperSearch. In the filter, choose Reviews.

Finding Journal Articles in SuperSearch

On the SuperSearch search results page, scroll down until you locate the Source Types filter on the left. Click on the both next to Academic Journals to limit your search results to journal articles.

Limiting to Peer Reviewed Articles in SuperSearch

Click on the box next to the "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed Journals)" filter on the left side of the SuperSearch results page.

Subject Searching in the Library Catalog

You can browse the catalog by selecting "Browse Alphabetically: By Topic" and searching for a keyword. Then choose a topic, either more narrow or broad, from the results list, to find other works on that subject.

Items from a search will also have subjects linked in the description, once you click on the title. This is called the "detailed record" of an item. Click on the left-most subject term to browse that, or the right-most term to browse the whole string of terms together.

You can also search, instead of browse, for subjects. In a subject search, choosing the most specific subject, which is the term on the far right, results in a narrower search.

 

Subject Searching in SuperSearch

On the SuperSearch results page, browse the subjects below each results or in the Subject filter on the left to learn more about the topic. You can see more options by clicking "Show More" on the left. You can search or browse for subjects of your choice.

Filters/Limiters in SuperSearch

SuperSearch has filters, or what it calls limiters, on the left-hand side of the results page, that can narrow your search results.

Citing Sources in AI LibGuide

Infographic about the importance of citing sources including: to give credit to ideas that are not your own, to provide support for your argument, to enable your reader to to find and read the sources you used, to avoid honor code violations, and what you’ll need when citing generative AI: tool name and version, time and date of usage, prompt or query, output from generative AI tool, follow up queries and responses, and the name of the person who queried.

ROBOT Infographic

Image of a robot smiling and waving beside the following text: Robot, Check your AI program results. R, Reliability, make sure to fact check AI generate content; O, Objective, think about the goal of the AI program you are using; B, Bias, what bias could be in this AI program? What was the program trained on?; O, Ownership, Who runs/owns this AI program? What are their goals?; T, Type, How does this AI model get to the output you see?

AI Academic Search Engines and RAG

Chart about AI Academic Search Engines and Rag including 3 sections. One titled What is Retreival Augmented Generation? With the content: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is when an AI program first retrieves information relevant to your question and uses that information to generate an answer. The second titled How Does RAG Work? With the content: Retrieval: AI searches its knowledge base for relevant information, Augmented: That information, along with the question is used to prompt an LLM, Generation: The LLM generates an answer. The third is titled AI Academic Search Engines with the content: These systems use RAG to find sources and generate a summary of those sources in response to a question.

 

How Academic Search Engines Work

Stylized tab box with the text How Academic Search Engines Work being clicked with a mouse

Citations to Answers Given by ChatGPT Chart

A chart showing the percentage of citations to answers given by ChatGPT that were fictional, conflated, or factual. The results being 72.5% fictional for GPT3.4, 71.2% fictional for GPT 4, 5.5% conflated for GPT3.5, 9.2% conflated for GPT4, 22% factual for GPT3.5, and 19.5% factual for GPT4

AI Meme

A woman labeled with the text “ChatGPT” walking away from a couple while the man in the couple, who is labeled with the text “students”, turns to look back at her and the woman next to him, labeled with the text “learning and writing with integrity” looks disapprovinly at him.

EBSCO NLS

The Wellelsey SuperSearch interface highlighting where the Natural Language Search check box is under the search options header

What is AI?

Header with the title "What is AI?" followed by drawings of two human brains and one brain made up of lines and dots

AI is NOT a Search Engine

Header with the title "AI is NOT a Search Engine" followed by a computer

Ethical Concerns

Header with the title "Ethical Concerns" followed by a scale