Guides
Part of Source evaluation and claim mapping: a practical guide
How to check an unfamiliar online source before trusting a claim
Online source verification workflow for preserving a page, identifying its publisher, reading laterally, tracing evidence, comparing reports, and recording limits.
What to take away
- Preserve the page and its context before it changes.
- Identify the publisher through independent records, not the site's own description alone.
- Leave the page to see what credible outside sources say about it.
- Trace quotations, figures, images, and documents to their original evidence.
- Judge the claim separately from the reputation of the person sharing it.
A polished page can be right, wrong, outdated, satirical, sponsored, copied, or built around one unsupported sentence. Design is not evidence. Use the page as a lead, then establish who made it, what it claims, and where its information came from.
Photo and credit
The photograph supplies historical context. It does not describe the methods or accuracy of a current online publisher.
1. Freeze what you received
Save the exact URL, visible headline, byline, publication and update times, screenshot, referral path, and access time. Copy the text needed for review and note dynamic elements such as counters, embedded posts, or changing maps. Do not redistribute sensitive personal information merely to preserve it.
Check whether the URL is the publisher's page, a platform preview, a syndication copy, an archive, or a lookalike domain. Expand shortened URLs safely. Record redirects and language versions because they may expose a different owner or date.
2. State the claim in neutral words
Remove outrage, praise, and implied motive. Split the statement into who, did what, where, when, amount, comparison, and cause. Mark which element would change the story if wrong. This gives the search a target.
If the page offers no checkable assertion, do not invent one. Satire, prediction, and opinion need correct labeling and attribution, but not every sentence can receive a true-or-false rating.
3. Identify who is behind the page
Look for a named legal or editorial entity, staff, contact details, ownership, funding, standards, corrections, and dates. Then confirm those details outside the site. Search the organization and key people with terms such as ownership, registration, funding, correction, lawsuit, research, or review. Distinguish an organization's self-description from independent evidence about it.
Check the author's relevant experience and the publisher's relationship to the subject. Expertise in one field does not transfer automatically to another. An anonymous author may still supply authentic evidence, but anonymity raises the amount of independent work needed.
4. Read laterally
Stanford Graduate School of Education's report on how professional fact-checkers assess online credibility describes fact-checkers leaving an unfamiliar site and opening other pages to learn who was behind it. In the reported study, this lateral approach produced faster and more warranted judgments than staying on the original site and inspecting its surface features.
Scan several search results before clicking. Prefer records and reporting that identify their evidence. Look for independent agreement, substantive criticism, prior names, affiliations, and whether the page is known satire. Search exact phrases to detect copying.
5. Trace every load-bearing item
Open the cited study, court record, dataset, video, transcript, or photograph. Confirm title, author, date, version, population, unit, and relevant passage. A link can be real yet fail to support the sentence beside it.
For a quotation, find the full exchange. For a number, locate the table and denominator. For an image, seek the earliest file and surrounding event. For a study, distinguish findings from a press release's interpretation. If the trail ends at another summary, label it as an unconfirmed secondary claim.
6. Compare and document
Build a small evidence table with claim, source, support, conflict, independence, and limit. Contact the responsible organization when the disputed fact is material. Set a response deadline that matches the risk and publication need.
Conclude at claim level: supported, contradicted, misleading through missing context, unresolved, or not checkable. Save the search terms, pages, files, calculations, and contact attempts. Another editor should be able to reproduce the decision.
Common questions
Does a .org address prove reliability?
No. Domain endings do not establish ownership, method, evidence, or accuracy.
Is an old page automatically wrong?
No. Its facts may remain correct, but current claims require current confirmation and a clear date.
Should I trust a page with many citations?
Only after checking whether the citations are independent, current, and relevant to the linked sentences.
When should I stop searching?
Stop when the material claim is supported to the required risk level, or when further searching is unlikely to resolve it and the uncertainty can be stated honestly.