It was a dark and stormy night… You were at your desk looking at your workload for the week, and you could hear the rain pattering on the window and the wind whistling eerily outside. “Did I remember to lock the front door?” you ask yourself. (You know that pretty much half of all horror movie scenarios could be easily avoided by remembering to lock the door.) “I'll check in a minute after I see what I have due this week,” you tell yourself. You open your assignments for the week, and your blood turns to ice as a chill runs down your spine. You have an assignment due tomorrow that you didn't know about!
That's where the library can help - we are the “ghostbusters” that can help you out of this horror story! Here are some common “academic nightmares” and how the library can help you be the “final girl” (or guy) and save yourself.
The Case of the Vanishing Source
The assignment says you need three peer-reviewed articles on a topic, and you don't even know what peer-reviewed means, much less how to find any. Luckily for you, we have guides and tutorial videos that explain! Try these:
- Find Peer-Reviewed and Scholarly Materials (guide) - Learn what peer-reviewed and scholarly materials are, how to find them, and how to confirm that they are peer-reviewed.
- What is a Peer-Reviewed Journal? (video) - Learn about the difference between peer-reviewed journals and popular magazines.
- Find a Peer-Reviewed Journal (video) - Learn how to find peer-reviewed journals in the library.
Ok, you know what peer-reviewed journals are, how to find them in the library, and how to confirm their peer-review status. But how do you find articles on your topic? We have guides for that, too!
- Develop a Search Strategy (guide) - Check out this guide before doing any search. It explains the whole process from start to finish: how to choose a topic, choose a database, draft your search string, and refine your results.
- Using the Library Search Box (video) - The search box on the library home page searches about 80% of our databases simultaneously, so it's a good place to start. This video explains how.
- Using the Library Advanced Search Box (video) - Learn how to fine-tune your search even more with the library's advanced search tool.
These guides will give you the skills you need to navigate your way out of any scary research situation!
The Phantom Citations
You used a generative AI tool, like Copilot, to help generate ideas for a paper. You understand how to use AI responsibly and even asked it to provide citations for the ideas. However, you searched the library and Google and can't find them anywhere. What's going on? They could be phantom citations created by an AI tool! These phantom citations even have a real name - they're referred to as hallucinations, and they really can be a little eerie. AI tools are trained to give an answer - any answer - and they sometimes make things up, especially if it's an obscure topic. In these phantom citations, bits and pieces might be real, but the article isn't. The author might be real or the journal might be real, but the article title could be hallucinated by AI.
Luckily, we have some resources in the library to help you spot these “phantom citations” and not let them drag you into their ghostly alternate reality!
- Verify Citations from Generative AI (guide) - Learn how searching the library is different than getting a response from AI tools and how to verify if citations are real.
- How Do I Verify Citations Generated by AI? (video) - Learn how to spot hallucinated citations quickly and find out if any parts of them can lead to real sources.
The Web of Misinformation
We all know the “rabbit holes” we can fall into when researching things out of personal interest, but the same thing can happen when researching topics for an assignment. If you're not careful about evaluating your sources, you can become lost in a tangled web of sketchy websites and misinformation.
To weave your way out of this tangled web, check out the library's guides and videos on evaluating sources:
- Evaluate Sources (guide) - Learn about methods for evaluating different types of sources and how bias can be a factor.
- Evaluate Data (guide) - Data needs to be evaluated the same as any other source. Learn how in this guide.
- Choosing Sources for Your Paper (video) - Learn about one of the tried and true methods for evaluating sources.
These guides can help you untangle the knotted web of unreliable sources that we sometimes find ourselves stuck in.
Happy Halloween! We hope that after checking out these resources, you'll feel better equipped to escape from any “academic nightmares” you might imagine!
Julia Reed is the systems librarian and focuses on technology development and maintenance. She's into graphic design, photography, and spending time outdoors in her free time.