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Discovery Seminar - The History of Cancer - Taliaferro-Smith - Fall 2024

This guide is for students in The History of Cancer Discovery Seminar at Oxford College.

  News Literacy


When doing research, you may read news articles to get background or up-to-date information on a topic. How can you tell if coverage of an event is comprehensive and reliable? Mike Caulfield, head of the Digital Polarization Initiative of the American Democracy Project, recommends applying the Four Moves or SIFT. These were designed to evaluate news stories and other posts.

Stop, Investigate the Source, Find Better Coverage, Take Claims, Quotes, and Media to the Source

The key thing to remember is that it's always a good idea to do some "external" searching after you read information of any kind - this means searching around for other sources that corroborate what you're reading, or provide more context.

How do you determine if the report you're reading is a reliable account?

  What Information is Reliable?


Some information that can help you:

  • Author: credentials, past work, motivation
    • Remember that authority based on experience and context: I am qualified to answer questions about librarianship or research, but I am not a good authority on Biblical scholarship, or experimental cancer treatments, as I have no experience in those fields
  • Publisher: how long have they been around, what else do they publish
  • Funding: who funded it, conflicts of interest
  • References: are there any, what are they
  Practice

Why do we have peer review measures in place? What happens when these procedures are not followed carefully? What happened with this article?

 

 

 

  Practice

Can you trace the source of this claim? Is the claim true? Where can you find better coverage?

 

 

 

Lateral Reading