Mathematics

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.

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"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.

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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.

Which are the best journals?

Peer-reviewed journal articles are the best place to start.

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.

Note that the above - apart from ArXiv - cover just one publisher. (Science Direct, for example, is a database of Elsevier publications).

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 these indexing databases in your research.

We may not have the full text of these articles (but can obtain them via Inter Library Loan) but you may find the database links through to full text where we have it.

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.

• 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.

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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