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Reading Lists

Finding Articles

The following specialist sources are suggested as good starting points for finding Higher Education Learning & Teaching materials. However, the Library's Discovery Service is also excellent for finding material relevant to higher education.

This list is not exhaustive. You may find other databases more suited to your needs on the Subject page for your own subject. These may include news of the latest teaching developments/initiatives in your own field.

  • ERIC

    (Searchable in EBSCO Discovery)

    The world's leading source of articles on Education

  • Research into Higher Education Abstracts

    (Searchable in EBSCO Discovery)

In addition you might like to look at some of the many journals we subscribe to, or which are freely available online.

Recommended Sources

There are a wide range of resources available for Higher Education Learning & Teaching beyond the obvious journals, databases and websites. Here we list a selection we think you'll find useful.

  • BoB: On demand TV and radio for education

    An archive of UK television and radio programmes from free to air channels (1998 onwards). For use in the UK only. Find some great tips about how to use BoB in these short videos.

  • British University Film and Video Council

    This resource, from Learning on Screen includes a Moving Image Gateway to 2,000 websites relating to moving image and sound materials, News on Screen resource for the study of newsreels and cinemagazines, Archives and Footage from screen heritage, including film production and television and video equipment, and International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio.

  • Linkedin Learning

    Online learning and training courses covering business and employability, as well as creative and technical skills.

  • Department for Education

    The UK Government department responsible for education and children's services, including further and higher education

  • Advance HE

    Used to be known as the Higher Education Academy

  • The Higher Education Empirical Research Database

    The HEER database has been developed by the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) of The Open University.

  • International Staff

    the website for international staff moving to UK universities

  • JISC

    innovation in the use of ICT for education and research

  • Office for Students

    The Office for Students (OfS) is an independent public body reporting to Parliament through the Department for Education (DfE). Their primary aim is to ensure that English higher education is delivering positive outcomes for students and OfS monitors higher education providers to ensure that they satisfy the conditions set out in the regulatory framework.

  • Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education

  • Society for Research into Higher Education

  • VOCED

    VOCED is a free research database for technical and vocational education and training.

Referencing

Use Referencing@Portsmouth to find out how to reference all the sources you have used:

Everyone on courses including education uses APA 7th edition.
Use Search APA 7 inside Referencing@Portsmouth to locate specific referencing advice on chapters, articles, reports, as well as abbreviations, appendices, tables and more.

New to referencing? Watch this short APA basics video.

 

Can I use ChatGPT/AI to generate references? 

Be aware that ChatGPT and similar tools invent academic references (see the more button for why). Using such fabricated information in your work is considered academic misconduct so you should always double check any AI generated references. The University has guidance for students on the use of AI and the Library has produced guidance on citing and referencing generative AI.

 

ChatGPT is a large language model which has been trained on 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. 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).

Reference

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

All reference generators make errors! 

Ensure you check and edit your references before submitting your work.  Here are some common errors.

There are many different ways to generate APA citations:

  • Quick options:
    • Look for a "Cite" button in EBSCO databases like Discovery, or in Ebook Central, Statista, Google Scholar etc.
  • Advanced options:
    • See our referencing tools page. The humanities and social sciences librarian supports the use of EndNote Online.

We do not advise using the referencing tool in Word.