Verify a source's identity before you publish

Source verification when all you have is a name

Source verification for journalists often starts with very little: a name, a job title, an employer, maybe a city. To verify a source's identity, you need to know that those details hold up and belong to one real person. By hand, that takes many searches, and a common name pulls in pages about other people.

Deep Search is a people search for journalists, researchers and anyone who needs to find primary sources about a person. Type the name, add the employer or city your source gave you, and press Find matches. Then pick the person you mean and get the full report.

The report sets out what public pages say about that person: work history, education, public profiles and public photos linked to them. A search usually takes a minute or two. See how a report is built, or how it compares with searching the web yourself.

A quick verification routine

Tools help, but source verification for journalists still comes down to judgement. Use this routine to verify a source's identity before a quote or a claim is published.

Match the claim

Write down exactly what the source told you: name, role, employer, city, and anything they said they did. Then check each detail against what public pages say. A different employer or a gap of a few years is a question to ask, not proof of a lie.

Find an independent page

A profile the source wrote about themselves is a claim, not confirmation. Look for a page someone else published: a staff page on the employer's own site, a conference programme, a news story, or a company register such as Companies House in the UK. One independent page that agrees is worth more than several profiles they control.

Go to the primary source

Open the page behind each fact you plan to use, and read it in full. Check the date, who published it and whether it really names the same person. That is how you find primary sources about a person instead of repeating someone else's summary.

Note what you could not confirm

Keep a short list of what checked out, what didn't, and what you could not find at all. A thin public record is not evidence either way, because plenty of real people have almost none. Put the gaps to your source directly, or leave the claim out.

Our guide to checking who you are about to meet goes further on companies, profiles and warning signs. The people you check have rights too: we remove email addresses and phone numbers from every result, and anyone can ask to have their name removed.