Investigate/Find trusted coverage
Remember that the web is constantly changing, so what you see on a search results page or on a website may be slightly different from what we (librarians Andrea and Dan) saw when we created this tutorial.
2. Investigate the source. Find trusted coverage.
These two parts of SIFT are closely connected: as we investigate a source, we want to be sure that the coverage we rely on is trustworthy.
Investigating this source.
A good starting point is asking where the source comes from. There are several things we might notice here. The presenter, Kerri Riviera, is founder of Autismo2 - Hyperbaric Clinic. We don’t know anything about this clinic. We’re also not familiar with the conference name or with the hosting organization listed on the page footer (Autism International Association). Looking further at any of these things will likely help us understand more about this source. Since we’re more likely to find more information on the conference itself or on the organization behind it than on one single presenter, it may be more effective to start with the larger entity.
Finding trusted coverage.
Let’s see what we can learn about the Autism One Conference. We’ll want to look for information from sources other than the conference organizers themselves. (Remember this is how fact-checkers work: they quickly look past the original source and at what other sources are saying about it.)
Reflecting Back & Applying Previous LearningThink back to the second video you watched, in which Mike Caulfield investigated the American College of Pediatricians. He googled the organization’s name. At the top of the results he discovered a Wikipedia article, which said that it is “a socially conservative advocacy group” with about 500 members. He compared its membership and budget and that of the well-recognized and established American Academy of Pediatrics. In addition, he noted that the American College of Pediatricians has been identified as a hate group (see the Wikipedia article about the organization, which includes a reference to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups). Now we’ll try a similar strategy with the Autism One Conference. Remember that we want to find sources about the organization that are not authored by the organization. Searching for “Autism One Conference wikipedia” (rather than simply “Autism One Conference”) is more likely to help us find those kinds of sources. |
Open another window and Google: autism one conference wikipedia.
Here’s what we got with our search. (Your results page may look slightly different, since online information is always changing and since your personal browser settings may affect your results.)
Let’s look at the second result, an article on Autism One from RationalWiki.
Rationale Wiki identifies Autism One as “Pseudoscience.” The article begins “Autism One is an annual summit where parents can come together and discuss new torture treatment methods for their autistic kids. Mainstays there include anti-vaccine quackery, alternative medicine, and general woo of all kinds.”
You may have noticed that the Rational Wiki has a sarcastic tone. It is clearly critical of the Autism One Conference and expresses some bias. That bias doesn’t necessarily mean that the information isn’t credible, but it’s something to consider as we evaluate Rational Wiki’s assessment. If Rational Wiki’s criticism is based on strong evidence, it deserves further consideration. Let’s consult a second source to see how its analysis compares to Rational Wiki’s.
Consulting a Second Source
The first result on our Google results page was a Wikipedia article about "Generation Rescue" that mentioned Autism One. As in this situation, often you may not find a Wikipedia article that is exclusively about the source you’re interested in, but the source may still be discussed in another Wikipedia article. This can provide important context for understanding the source. Let’s look at what it says...
Source: "Generation Rescue" Wikipedia article
“Generation Rescue previously co-sponsored an annual conference in Chicago along with another controversial charity, Autism One. The choice of speakers at these conferences led critics to accuse both organizations of promoting unproven therapies...They [the conferences] have also been criticized because many of the speakers presented ‘so-called treatments’ have a financial interest in them. [26]
This source clearly raises questions about Autism One, its partner organization Generation Rescue, and their co-sponsored conference. This information fits with Rationale Wiki’s assessment of Autism One. Autism One This is enough evidence to raise serious concerns about Autism One. We’ll benefit more from looking for sources in which we can have greater trust.
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).