What is lateral reading?
Lateral reading: Instead of staying with one website or article, you might need to jump around a bit. Open multiple tabs in your browser to follow links found within the source and do supplemental searches on names, organizations or topics you find. These additional perspectives will help you to evaluate the original article and can end up saving you time.
Things to remember:
- The top result on Google is not always the best. Take a moment to scan the results and skim the snippets beneath the links.
- Just because a website looks professional or credible doesn't mean that it is.
- Sometimes you can find out more about a website by leaving the site itself.
- You can use the command-F keyboard shortcut to search within an article for a name, group, or word.
- Right-click on a link to open in a new tab.
Attribution
This page was adapted from the University of Texas Libraries CC BY-NC
