Learning at Work

New students might like to take a Virtual Tour of the Library.

For the briefest of introductions, see this slide set.

For an introduction to these Subject Pages see this video.

.

"Ask the librarian for research help and she will guide you to some amazing resources you would never have found on your own.  These extra discoveries make the difference between an average paper and one that shines.  As an added bonus, this exercise also shaves hours from your research time."

Cal Newport - Monday Master Class: The Most Important Paper Research Advice You’ve Never Heard [1].

Your Faculty Librarian - see contact details right - can't be available 24/7 but these pages offer some of the best advice and resources available.  However, feel free to get in touch to make a face-to-face or virtual appointment if you think that would be helpful.

.

You may also wish to look at our Information Literacy pages which help guide you through the research process.  We have also created a suite of AI Literacy pages which may be of interest and a short Library Guide on using Generative AI in your work which you may find helpful.

• Using Generative AI in coursework or research

(pdf file 127 kb)

A short guide on how might legitimately use generative AI such as Chat GPT in your coursework, dissertations or research.

Sometimes it can be difficult to get started with your research for an assignment, as there are so many sources and so much you could read!
Remember to check your reading lists in Moodle as the best starting points, and then explore our Library resources.

For general reference sources and for study help, try Credo.

Can I use ChatGPT?
See under Plagiarism below for comments on the use of generative AI such as ChatGPT.  See also our small suite of AI Literacy pages.

Google
You can of course start searching Google for a topic and you may well find useful information.  (Here are some short cheat sheets to some of their less well known search commands.)  However, it can be time consuming to sort the wheat from the chaff particularly if you're under pressure of deadlines.  Use Library resources detailed on these pages to quickly find good quality information.  Or use Google Scholar to begin to find academic information.

Searching
To get the best from any database search, watch these short videos: Improving search results with keywords part 1 and Improving search results with keywords part 2 to improve your results using keywords and advanced searching, or see this Library Guide on Choosing Keywords.

University can demand more reading than previous study.  A two page Library Guide on Academic Reading may help you to make the best use of your time.  There is also a two-page Library Guide on Academic Reading - Journal Articles. 

If you want more in depth support on the subject, try the ebook below.

To find print books:

• Search the Library Catalogue (second search box on the page)
• For each book, note the floor, number and author code: FIRST FLOOR 658.00721 BRY 
• Technology books can be found in many places in the Library, use the Locate a Book search tool (at the bottom of this page) with the shelfmark for the book which you can find on the catalogue.
• This web page gives information on borrowing from the Library.

To find ebooks:

• Search the Library Catalogue (second search box on the page)
• Refine your search on the left hand side using 'Electronic Books'.  
• Click on the title of the ebook to load the full record, and then 'Online access' to view.

More about using the Library Catalogue

More about ebooks

Advanced users may wish to look at some of these scholarly ebook collections:  (Note that we have other specialist subject collections under other Subject Pages.)

Scholarly or academic journals contain lots of individual articles on specific topics, written by different authors.  

They are highly regarded as a source of academic information because they include expert opinions, research findings and references to follow up.

They are written by specialised professionals and academics (such as your lecturers).

The best quality journal articles are peer-reviewed which means they have been reviewed by an expert before publication.

Where to start with journal articles?

See this guide on the Anatomy of a journal article.

The APA have put together a useful activity on using journal articles.

Which are the best journals?

Peer-reviewed journal articles are the best place to start.  Check to see if the database you are using has a filter (or 'Refine' option) to only see these.

Advanced users may wish to find out which journals are the highest ranked in a subject area:

• Scopus - click on sources and choose your subject area
• Journal Citation Reports

You can get the most out of searching databases by considering what keywords you use. 

For an introduction to Discovery watch this video by our Business Librarian.

Watch this video for a demonstration of how to analyse your keywords and this video for a demonstration of using your keywords in an advanced search.

Alternatively, either see this two page Library Guide on Choosing Keywords for tips on this or use this form to analyse the concepts of your searches.  For a sample assignment title to unpick the concepts, look at the PowerPoint below.

Keyword selection is one of the most vital parts of your search techniques. You can type an assignment or dissertation title into Google, Google Scholar or Discovery and you will get results.  You can just type in words that occur to you and you will find material. However, you can dramatically improve what you are retrieving with a little thought and also by using the advanced search that each of those offers.

Let’s take an example where your assignment or project title is concerned with ‘preserving privacy through social networking decentralization’. Typing that phrase into Discovery, for example, will find around 600 items. You might think that’s enough to be going on with but by the time you’ve refined your results – perhaps by date or by source type – there may be very little of any use.

If we start to think about alternative terms we can widen the pool of our original search and include more relevant articles.

For ‘social networking’ we might think of ‘social network services’ or ‘SNS’ (or even ‘S.N.S.’ which most databases will treat as a different search) or ‘social media’ or perhaps even ‘online interaction’.
Note that these are not all synonymous but may be the preferred term for a subject area, or a term used by some authors, or close enough to give relevant results.

For ‘privacy’ we might think about ‘anonymity’ and/or ‘security’ and the latter might lead us on to ideas such as ‘data handling’ or ‘data privacy’ or ‘data security’.

We can consider using phrase searches to increase relevance: “social network services” (with the double quotes, will find fewer items than simply typing social network services, but the fewer results will almost certainly be more relevant.

We might consider different spelling such as ‘decentralization’ or ‘decentralisation’; or we could consider using the truncation feature of most databases to search for several words at once, e.g. decentrali* would find ‘decentralization’ or ‘decentralisation’ or ‘decentralising’ etc. Note that you can’t use truncation within a phrase search; note also that Google will ignore punctuation, such as truncation or full stops in abbreviations, except for “ “ which it treats as a phrase search.

If you’re finding too much material, you might choose to use narrower keywords, for example instead of ‘social networking’ try ‘facebook’ or ‘twitter’ or ‘linkedin’.

If you’re finding too little, you might need to broaden your search. The mindmap image below shows an example of how you might develop your thinking but this will be an ongoing process and this map, or lists of words if you prefer, will be an ongoing, organic process that will develop as your knowledge of a topic grows. Instead of a mindmap, some people prefer lists and our Library Guide Applying a Search Strategy gives you a template form that can help with thinking through this process.

•  preserving privacy through social networking decentralization

(jpg file 86 kb)

In fact, look out for keywords that a database or author or publisher has assigned to an article or conference paper. Even if the actual paper is not relevant, you might get good ideas for your keywords from these to reutilize in your subsequent searches.

Some databases offer a thesaurus which can help with keyword selection. Engineering Village – very useful for a variety of technology subject searches – is a good example. 

Note that you may find terms referred to as ‘keywords’, ‘subject headings’ or perhaps ‘descriptors’.

Now take a look at how thinking about our search terms can affect an advanced search on Discovery. Instead of:
“social networking”
AND
decentralization
AND
privacy

which at time of writing produces nearly 1800 results (which is already better than typing the topic as a phrase into the simple search box as above), we might try:

“social networking” OR “social network services” OR sns OR s.n.s.
AND
decentrali*
AND
privacy OR anonymity OR security

which gives over 12,000 results. A much bigger pool of relevant results with which to refine our search by date or source type etc.

To see more on what is going on with the OR and AND words, see our Library Guide on Boolean Logic.

In summary:
Think about the keywords you use in the Library Catalogue, in database searching, or in Google or Google Scholar. Consider:
• Alternative words – lift/elevator; colour/color
• Note tips such as truncation: comput* will search (in most databases but not Google) for
computer, computers, computing etc.
• Watch out for punctuation such as hyphens which Google ignores but many databases treat
as a separate search
• Use “ “ to search for phrases “peer-to-peer computing”
• Related keywords: social media, social network
• If you’re finding too much, narrow down your search
• If you’re finding too little, broaden your search out

Not all databases we have access to contain the full text of an article.  Some contain the bibliographic data and an abstract or summary of the contents.  If you want to do wider searches and literature reviews which draw on the width of the literature, you'll need to do a little more work and include results from these indexing databases in your research.  Indexing databases may link through to full text where we have it, if not try an Interlibrary Loan.

Much Health & Safety (or Occupational Safety & Health as is often used in North America) information can be found in our standard databases such as Discovery or Engineering Village.  However, we do have some subject specific resources which may be of use - particularly for specialised information such as fact sheets or reports.

Legal information such as cases and statutes may be required in your assignments.  This can prove a tricky area for non-specialists.

Fortunately, however, we have a Law Librarian who has put together an excellent set of Subject Pages which have lots of resources and support and which you can find here.

Also, you might like to view these short videos on finding various kinds of information in the Lexis and Westlaw databases.

Your legal references will almost certainly still need to be in APA 7th edition format, but OSCOLA is available in Referencing@Portsmouth.  Check with your lecturer which is required.  Do not mix styles.

*****

For a full list of all our current newspaper resources and our newspaper archives, click here.

Google Scholar searches for academic content online. It's a useful additional resource when looking for books, journal articles and other papers.

Some material is available online (often in Institutional Repositories like the University of Portsmouth PURE database), some are not freely available and you may be asked to pay for access to some resources.

However, you can save time and set Scholar to show which results you can access via your University of Portsmouth's library subscriptions:

• In Scholar, click on the three line icon in the top left corner
• Select 'Settings' and 'Library Links'.
• Enter 'Portsmouth' in the search box and select 'University of Portsmouth Library - Full-text@Portsmouth' and Save.
• Any results available via the University Library will now show a Full-Text@Portsmouth link on the right hand side.

If it's still not available, we may be able to get it via Interlibrary Loan.

Scholar also offers an alerting service, a referencing option and a times cited count.

It has slightly more limited advanced search features (see below).  If you need full Boolean Logic use other databases such as Discovery, IEEEXplore, Science Direct, Business Source Complete or Engineering Village.

Using Google Scholar guide

Google Scholar also includes an Advanced search feature.  This can be found under the three line icon in the top left corner.

On the Advanced search screen you can find articles in various ways:

'with all of the words' - this is the equivalent to an AND search in a database but you do not need to type AND between your words or phrases.

'with the exact phrase' - this is the equivalent of a phrase search in " " marks in a database but you do not need to type the quotation marks

'with at least one of the words' - this is the equivalent of an OR search in a database but you do not need to type OR between your words or phrases

'without the words' - this is the equivalent of a NOT search in a database (although note that as with a NOT search, it may discard useful results)

You can also limit by where the words occur, author, publisher and/or date.

AND, OR and NOT are explained further in our Library Guide on Boolean Logic but note that Advanced Search on Google Scholar is a limited and you may wish to use Library databases with advanced searches instead.

Use these powerful tools to find out which articles are citing other articles, to follow up references and to see which are the most highly cited articles: (NB: Google Scholar - see above - also has a similar feature. Look for the 'Cited by...' link.)

Watch this video for a brief introduction to citation searching.

*****

For a full list of all our current newspaper resources and our newspaper archives, click here.

Plagiarism - why do we care? (file for download)

  This file is restricted to University members. You must login to download it.

For a video running through these slides, see here.

.

ChatGPT (and other generative AI)

You may have read about ChatGPT and similar generative AI which use large language models to respond to user prompts with statistically probably words and sentences which have the appearance of human generated output.  They are often seen as shortcuts when conducting academic research.  You may even have experimented with such tools or used them to assist with your studies/research.

Current generative AI, such as ChatGPT, cannot and do not think, analyse, reason or argue.  All they can do is sort words into familiar patterns.  This allows them to create persuasive but potentially unsound rhetoric.  Anything produced by the current generation of AI should therefore be viewed with critical scepticism.  AI cannot find or replace genuine research using trusted information sources.

Understanding how to use these tools correctly is essential to avoid breaches such as plagiarism that could impact your successful course progression. 

• You must ensure you appropriately cite and reference any text or output generated by AI in an assignment.
• You must check the legitimacy of the information contained there.
• The final product must be your own work and not just copied from an AI generator.

Examples of usage that might be considered legitimate could be in assisting with planning an assignment, generating ideas for further investigation, or helping find additional search terms or keywords.  You may wish to check with tutors whether such usage is acceptable.

The University has issued a statement on the use of Generative AI such as ChatGPT in assignments and the Library has produced guidance on citing and referencing generative AI.  You might also want to note the general student guidance offered here.

You should be aware that ChatGPT and similar tools invent some academic references.  They are large language models which have been trained which words should appear and in what order - hence similar authors/titles/journals get linked with each other, producing very plausible sounding references that actually don't exist - the words simply have connections to each other within its training data.  Using such fabricated information in your work may be considered academic misconduct so you should always double check your reference lists.

When prompted "How does ChatGPT predict which words come next?" ChatGPT stated that it "predicts which words come next based on the patterns it learns from the training data. When given a prompt or context, the model uses its knowledge of language patterns to generate likely sequences of words that would follow the input" ... "it predicts one word at a time, based on the previously generated words" ... " and then calculates the probability distribution of the next word in the sequence based on the patterns it has learned from the training data" (OpenAI, 2023).

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 23 Version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

• Referencing - a few common hazards and sources of help (file for download)

  This file is restricted to University members. You must login to download it.

For a video running through these slides, see here.

For a short video looking at the balance of your references, see this video.