Information literacy

Whether you’re coming from school or college, another university, or have been out of education for a while it is important to have a good grasp of all the resources and support that are on offer to you and how to use them in the best ways for your assignments and dissertations.

These short pages will help you get more out of:

• Library resources such as books, journals, databases and specialist resources - not to mention the Library website itself

• the Internet and other resources;

• Learning and research techniques; and

• Library support such as chat/email/phone, social media, lectures & workshops and your Faculty Librarians.

When planning your assignment you should consider the following:

• Why do you need the information?  Is it for an essay, a report, a presentation or to inform a design?
  • Refer to Moodle for details of your assignment, including how it will be marked.

• What do you need to find out about?  What is your question asking you to do?
  • Applying a Search Strategy, will help you to break down your topic into concepts.  You may prefer to approach this with a Mind Map.

• How are you going to search for the information?  What keywords and phrases are going to help you locate relevant information
  • Choosing Keywords explains how to improve the relevance of your search results significantly.

• Where are you going to look for the information?  For example, do you need up-to-date information from newspapers, academic journal articles, statistical data, an image or a video?
  • The Ocean of Information guides you to appropriate sources for different contexts. It also links to guidance on how to reference them correctly.

The library is a large physical space and an even larger online space, so familiarise yourself with what it has to offer as soon as you can. 

• One of our most frequently asked questions is how do I find my books?
  • The Library Catalogue is a good place to begin. It will help you to locate the printed books in the library and provide links to ebooks, which you can access anywhere

• What if you want to browse the collections?
  • Visit the Book Locations page to search or browse for a broad subject area, e.g. architecture.

• What if you want to know where things are, e.g. the toilets or the silent zone?
  •  Visit the Find Your Space pages to find library floor plans and more.

• What about accessing books and other electronic resources from home?
  • The Accessing Electronic Resources pages will get you started.

• Start your research by reading some recommended texts on your reading list. For some topics Google can get you started with your own research. Here are some ways you can make it work more effectively.
  • Using Google Scholar is a useful introduction to advanced search techniques and Google Scholar.
  • You may wish to explore the Advanced Search on Google in more depth.

• Search the Library Discovery Service. It is a bit like Google for good quality library resources.  It searches many information sources at once
  • The Discovery Service webpage will give you a useful introduction. 
  • The Discovery Animated Guide will give you a quick overview.
• If you want to find resources recommended by your Faculty Librarian, visit the Subject pages. Choose your Faculty and then your subject area.
  • The Subject Pages are useful when you are trying to find particular types of information, for example, newspapers, journals, or visual information.

Once you’re started on your research you’ll soon become aware of the wealth of resources that are available to you. A simple check of the Library catalogue or a quick Google search will only take you so far. There are lots of other options.

Firstly take a look at the variety of resources the Library can offer with notes on why you might find them useful.

Then, if you’re taking your research to a higher level, look at our Research pages particularly under ‘For academic and research staff and PhD students’.

There is more detail on some specifics in these guides and page:

• Finding Journal Articles

• Determining if you’re looking at an Academic Journal or Popular Magazine 

• Using Google Scholar 

• Check out the Subject Pages for your area of research which have pages linked under ‘find articles’ with links to and descriptions of specialized databases.

Additional, more general, specialized resources:

• The Map Library 

• Our Visual Culture page provides a good range of audio and visual resources.

At university, assignments, projects and dissertations can often require a step up in the amount of reading that is required.  Textbook reading for a module, background reading for a subject, and perhaps keeping up with professional magazines (or ‘trade journals’) for more vocational courses.  What’s more the nature of the reading changes as you begin to look at topics in more detail and the topics themselves may be considerably harder to understand.

Given that time is limited, subjects may be difficult, and not everyone enjoys reading for pleasure, it’s worth learning a few skills that can help speed up the process or allow you to get more out of what time is available.  We’ve kept these pages short so as not to add to the reading burden!

Academic Reading: Journal Articles is a short guide to reading journal articles and conference proceedings.

You might also want to have a look at How can I tell whether it’s an Academic Journal or Popular Magazine? in order to clarify in your mind the differences between an academic journal and a popular magazine.

As you start to locate resources for your assignment or dissertation you need to begin to think about what you’re finding. Not every webpage, or book for that matter, is equal and you will need to critically evaluate what is relevant and appropriate. Things to consider:

• What kind of resource is it?
  • You may need an overview of a broad subject in which case a book might be most helpful; or you might need an in depth, up-to-date piece of research on a very narrow topic so a conference paper may be more useful. Your lecturers may be expecting to you use scholarly information and not Wikipedia articles or general web pages.  

• Where have you found the resource?
  • Is it a journal or a database which the University has paid to access? Or is it a collection of papers of unknown origins? Can you trust the source? Which leads to:

• Who has produced the resource?
  • What are the credentials of the author? Is it a website with an axe to grind? Is it a peer reviewed article in a scholarly journal? Is it a news source with a particular bias? Is it a self-published book which no one has edited? Can you assess the author or publisher’s objectivity? Who is their audience – the academic community, public interest, schools?

• Why are you using this?
  • Is it general background reading to extend your knowledge, or does it contain a piece of information or a quote that you want to reference to support your argument? It can be useful to consider balance in your reference list – do you have sufficient academic references compared to, say, web pages? Is it actually relevant to your dissertation or assignment?

• When was the resource published?
  • Is the information out of date? Have you looked for the most recent research? (Not that age should necessarily be a barrier, it will depend on subject area or perhaps a need to refer to a classic original paper). If it’s a website, does it look as if it’s still active and do the links still work?

Evaluating Internet Resources looks in more detail at assessing resources found on the web.

The ‘what’ above, can also be very helpful when you start referencing so that you know what pages to use on Referencing@Portsmouth. 

It is important at University to ensure that you are referencing your sources, referencing them correctly, and managing the process as painlessly as possible.  This will help you avoid getting into difficulty over plagiarism, make the most efficient use of your time, and demonstrate your subject mastery. 

• Plagiarism
  We don’t work in isolation and are almost always basing our work on work that has gone on before us.  “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”  Sir Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke (1676)*.

Plagiarism occurs if we fail to cite other people’s work and use it as our own, whether it is a quotation from a book, a paraphrase from a web page, data from a journal article or a paid-for essay from a “paper mill”.  Unless you can claim it is common knowledge you should reference the source.  You can even be accused of plagiarism for poor reference practices or reusing your own work without proper attribution.

• Demonstrating your reading and subject knowledge
  Good referencing practices will help you avoid plagiarism.  It also demonstrates to your readers or lecturers the width of your reading (not just from one source or one type of resource) and the depth of your reading (good quality resources, works of major importance on your subject).  

Note that references are made up of two parts: the reference (which will appear in a list at the end of your assignment or dissertation) and the citation which appears in the main text where you mention the work.

• Referencing
  Referencing is essentially about ensuring that your reader can locate the work that you are citing.  There are various systems for doing this but most University of Portsmouth students are expected to use APA 7th Edition.  Some will be asked to use Vancouver (School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences) or Oscola (law).  Always check with your lecturers what style you should use.

The Library supports referencing in three ways: Firstly through our Referencing webpage  which provides advice and lots of examples.  Secondly through our Chat and email help – although we cannot do your referencing for you, we are always happy to help give advice and pointers.  Thirdly through our seasonal referencing ‘pop-ups’ where you can ask for specialist help.

In addition, good habits of note taking and managing your references, from initial reading to final citation in a submitted piece of work, will help you to save time hunting for a tiny reference detail when you’re under pressure of deadlines.  Whether you use a notebook and pen, an app on your phone, cards in a shoebox or a dedicated piece of software, it’s worth developing good habits from the outset.  Note that apps and the ‘cite’ button found in many databases can be really helpful, but their output should always be checked for accuracy.  You may find referencing management software helpful. 

* Newton, I. (1675). Letter to Robert Hooke dated February 5. 

For expanded support on AI Literacy see these pages

“Don’t do it”

There are those who will advise you not to use large language models such as ChatGPT in any coursework or dissertations. They are quite right in that you should not use AI to write your text for you. This is considered plagiarism and counts as academic misconduct which can draw penalties. 

See the University Guidance on the use of AI.

Library staff will also point out that you must not use it to produce references. Generative AI is excellent at making up references which don’t exist. Remember, it’s not intelligent, it has simply read a lot of the internet and is good at predicting what words might go next to each other. This is why the references can look convincing but use made up journal titles or authors.

However, there may be applications which are entirely appropriate and such AI tools are likely to become part of life, study and work as they improve and become more widespread. This guide explores some applications for coursework or research and provides tips on writing useful prompts.

Planning and Outlines

Generative AI can be useful at the planning stage of any work to suggest stages in the process which you need to prepare for or avenues of research which might be worth pursuing. However, note that it will only be offering suggestions based on the pages (or text) that it has already been trained on so it will not produce anything novel or creative. Also note, that ChatGPT, for example, has a cutoff date of Sept 2021 so it doesn’t know about anything which has happened or been discovered after this date.

It is always worth spending time considering your own ideas on your topic and finding inspiration in reading widely, paying close attention in lectures, or networking with specialists (e.g. your lecturers offering tutorials or at conferences for which there may be bursaries for student attendance).

AI may be also be useful in scheduling your time spent on an assignment and how you can fit in the work necessary in an already busy schedule.

If you do use generative AI, be as specific as you can in your prompts to generate more useful responses. Follow up on bland (non-specific) suggestions by asking further questions.

Conversations

If you’re struggling to understand a concept or if you’re finding it hard to express yourself, use generative AI as a willing partner to discuss the issues and perhaps find a way forward. However, be very careful you’re not simply paraphrasing its output as your own. Here you might find that just one prompt is insufficient, but you need to use several to get useful responses which are more specific. Also, consider using prompts to ask for multiple viewpoints.

You can ask the AI to imagine it is a teacher or college student or to limit its language complexity to get it to answer in more helpful ways. Giving the AI some context and giving it specific relevant details can be powerful in writing good prompts. (Beware of giving out any personal information, however).

Summaries

Be very careful about asking generative AI to summarize particular texts. Even if it knows (or claims to know) the work in question, its summary can be very limited, biased or miss key points. It is always worth checking for yourself the actual content that it is attempting to summarize.

Keywords

Selecting good keywords to use in searches for material is a vital part of your research and can be challenging, particularly in a second or third language. There are various tools you can use to help with this such as the keywords (or descriptors) provided in Discovery, a technical thesaurus (e.g. in Business Source Complete, ERIC or Engineering Village), keywords you find attached to relevant journal articles, or by taking inspiration from the suggested search terms that some search engines offer.

Generative AI can offer further assistance in suggesting vocabulary and related topics which may help you to either expand your searches or to refine them so that you can find just what you need to support the arguments you are making in an assignment or dissertation.

Don’t forget to be careful in the language of your prompts in order to get the best results. If you use the word ‘football’, don’t forget that many of these AIs are built by US companies and may not give you the same results as ‘soccer’. You should also check your spelling in case this affects your results.

You can ask AI to generate quite complex search strings which most databases will accept. Example: 

PROMPT: design a search string to search for Career experiences of women in STEM in the UK
RESPONSE: ("women in STEM" OR "female engineers" OR "female scientists" OR "women in technology" OR "women in mathematics") AND ("career experiences" OR "workplace challenges" OR "gender bias" OR "glass ceiling") AND ("UK" OR "United Kingdom" OR "Britain" OR "England" OR "Scotland" OR "Wales" OR "Northern Ireland")

Language Translation

Machine translation, such as Google Translate, has come a long way in the last few years. It can do a fairly good job with languages close to English (e.g. European languages) and can now manage at least an approximation of languages that are linguistically more distant (such as Asian languages). This means that it may now be possible to extract useful information from texts or journal articles that are written in a variety of languages. This can increase the diversity of your citations and arguments.

Generative AI can provide such translations, but care should still be taken with the results. Cite the original document and include in the main text or a footnote a note that machine translation was used. 

Check with your tutors that this type of citation is acceptable.

Going Further

Generative AI may be able to help you find suitable publications should you wish to publish your work. (One example might be Emerging Minds). Your tutor may be able to help with this as well and our Research Outputs Team can also assist with selecting academic journal titles and avoiding predatory publishers. Use a prompt which outlines your work and ask for recommendations on suitable titles. 

You can be specific about whether you want something academic or for a more general audience and you can ask why it recommends a particular title. Given a specific journal example in the prompt, AI may also be able to help you format your work in the required style. See also ResearchRabbit for an AI which focuses on academic work specifically.

Referencing

If you do use AI, make sure that you reference it as you would with anything else that is not entirely your own work. The Library has produced support in Referencing@Portsmouth to help with this. You may also wish to consider other ethical issues around the use of such generative AI. In particular, be aware that the AI might be biased. Companies do not release information on what large language models the AI has been trained on. It is easy to see that if, for example, they are trained on only English language data sets, or a corpus of text from a predominant geopolitical bloc, or using rules created by a small, homogenous groups of employees, then biases in the responses offered may creep in.

You should also be aware of intellectual property concerns – particularly with image creation AI – as generative AI may have been trained on original work without being licensed for the purpose or giving due credit.

Further Help on finding good resources for your coursework or dissertations is available from library@port.ac.uk or the 24/7 Chat or in person in the Library. Alternatively, you can contact your Faculty Librarian for more specialized, in-depth help. Just ask! We’d also be really interested in hearing how you’ve used generative AI in your studies or research, so please drop us a line if you’ve a story to tell.