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Email reference is available Monday through Friday during the Fall and Spring semesters. We try to respond within two days.
Chat with the library 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to meet with a librarian for in-depth help with your research.
Any words, ideas or images that you do not create yourself must be properly credited to avoid plagiarism.
Citing information sources acknowledges the origin of your information and it provides support and credibility to your work by showing evidence of your research.
A citation is a reference to the source of an idea, information or image. It typically includes enough identifying information, such as the author, title, date, publication format, etc. Access the CCSF Library Citing Sources page for handouts and link on how to cite a source.
To access this video, click video above, and enter log in using RAM ID if accessing from off-campus.
To access this video, click video above, and enter log in using RAM ID if accessing from off-campus.
It stands for:
Navigate away from your information source in order to see what other sources say about the person or organization who is responsible for the information you are evaluating. Here’s how:
Using a search engine, type wikipedia after the domain name of a site, or after a person’s name, to show the wikipedia article at the top of your search results.
If you have doubts about the quality of claims on the webpage you are viewing, or want to find out whether a certain claim is true or false, use other news sources and fact-checking sites to verify information about the claim.
Use reliable fact-checking sites to verify claims:
Enter the claim you are trying to verify followed by the name of a fact-checking site to see any articles about the claim on the site at the top of your search results.
Enter the claim you are trying to verify in the Google search bar and click the News tab of your search results in order to confirm that other news sites are reporting the same story.
Confirm claims by searching them in large, nationally-known news sources. Free, full-text access to major daily newspapers is available to CCSF students, staff, and faculty through the U.S. Major Dailies database (use your RAM ID), such as:
Credits: Text adapted from The SIFT Method, Introduction to College Research, by Walter D. Butler, Aloha Sargent, and Kelsey Smith, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The SIFT Method, or The Four Moves, is the creation of Mike Caulfield, Director of Blended and Neworked Learning at Washington State University of Vancouver and author of Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, a free online book about evaluating information online.