When you find a source and want to figure out if it is a credible source, you may be tempted to read through the full article to figure out if the source is credible. This process (called reading vertically) can be time-consuming and does not give a full indication of how credible this source is.
Reading laterally is a skill used by professional fact-checkers that helps them quickly review a source and determine whether that source is credible or not. This means that instead of staying on the webpage to determine if the source is credible, lateral reading encourages you to leave the webpage and use other webpages to decide if a source is credible or not.
Check out the below video from Stanford History Education Group to learn more about lateral reading.
This article from The Weather Channel published in 2015 shows pictures of daisies, which have mutated as a result of exposure to radiation from the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. Let's say you wanted to determine the credibility of this article using lateral searching.
First, you might notice that this article does not have an author's name listed, which means we cannot verify the qualifications of who wrote this article. Instead, let's look at the website this source was published on The Weather Channel.
The Weather Channel is an authoritative source for reporting on weather events. A look at their most recent news stories all mention weather events, however the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster was not a weather event, so it is hard to verify the credibility of their information.
To figure out if the information in your source is credible, you decide to take a look at an article from another credible source, Smithsonian Magazine. Affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Magazine is an educational magazine aimed to educate the public on history, science, and art topics.
The article from the Smithsonian Magazine claims the mutated flowers are not the result of radiation from the power plant disaster, but a regular gardening phenomena called fasciation.
Since we have an author's name for the Smithsonian Magazine article, let's quickly look them up. The "About" page on Fessenden's website says they are a freelance science journalist and their work has been featured in publications such as Nature, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Scientist. Since Fessenden has written science articles for many credible scientific publications, they would be considered a credible author.
Finally, take a look at the expert website Fessenden cited in their article. The website Gardening Know How is a "virtual encyclopedia of gardening information" that receives over 180 million views per year. Gardening Know How is an expert website about gardening and provides authoritative information about fasciation in flowers.
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