Citation Chaining
The first step is noticing these in an article you're reading.
What are other cited sources?
Confirmation bias is this.
What is the tendency to seek out and emphasize whatever confirms your preexisting beliefs and to ignore complicating and contradictory evidence?
"Reading laterally" means this.
What is to cross-check all references like a professional fact-checker?
This element of the test refers to checking how recently the information was created.
What is currency?
Writing about current events? You'll probably need one of these.
What is a news article, magazine or book?
The second step is to do this with the article's cited sources.
What is to read or look them up and read?
One way to avoid confirmation bias is to skip your favorite search engine and use these.
What are library databases?
Money is a powerful motivater and lateral readers find out this information.
What is who sponsors, owns or has a financial stake in a source's or website's claims?
Determine this by asking who is the author, what are their affliations, what are their credentials and who is the sponsor of this info.
What is authority?
These might be harder to read, but they are relatively easy to citation chain.
What are scholarly sources?
"To start a chain, you might ask questions like these: '.....'." Name the first two questions.
What are: "In the material I have read, whom are the authors in dialogue with? Who are their 'they says'?"
To seek out a variety of perspectives, ask yourself these questions.
What are: Do all my sources agree? Come from the same websites, journals, or authors?
Reading laterally can mean opening several of these so that you can search a website's name with keyterms.
What are tabs?
This refers to if the source is about your topic, if it is too elementary or advanced, and if it is the same as too many of your other sources.
What is relevancy?
Writers should reduce [or synthesize] all your sources to one of these to prevent being thrown off track or getting on a distracting tangent.
What is a common conversation, issue, topic or central research question?
Start a citation chain in Google Scholar or a database by clicking this.
What are the "Cited by" or "Cited Reference" options?
Try doing this with a source's citations to find new perspectives.
What is citation chaining or reference mining?
To check on a source's credibility, search the name of the source and key terms like these in a search engine.
What are... "'funding,' 'credibility,' and 'bias'"?
If a source has evidence, unbiased language, and information you can confirm in another source, it has this.
What is accuracy?
Since the internet is full of misinformation that looks like fact, you should do this to any claims that seem improbable or sound suspect.
What is cross-check or laterally read?
One of the easiest ways to citation chain is to examine these at the end of a scholarly work.
What is the Works Cited page, the References page, or the bibliography at the end of the text.
Try becoming your own naysayer and ask these questions.
What are: How could I challenge or critique my own argument? What is the strongest objection I can imagine?
Try searching for the source or author on Wikipedia or another on of these, than using its references to start a citation chain.
What is an encyclopedia?
Inform, teach, sell, entertain or persuade: these are examples of a source's this.
What is purpose?
Nonscholarly search engines give results based on these and are designed to get clicks.
What are your previous searches?