Liberal Studies: Home

Write a question and/or argument.

As you explore your topic, answer these questions: 

• Is there enough good information for me to use in developing my own ideas on the topic?  
• Do I have enough knowledge to understand the writings on the topic? 
• After looking at a preliminary group of resources, do I still like this topic? 

For example: How does social media affect teens in school? 

Write out keywords that you expect to find in resources on your topic. 

These will include all main ideas.  More specific terms are usually better. 

Then, for each keyword, write as many synonyms as possible. 

Write out broader and narrower terms. 

For example: 

Do you need, books? articles? newpapers?

OneSearch is on the library's homepage. Click Databases under the search box to find more specific searching resources like ERIC and PsychInfo.  

If you’re unsure which database to choose, try Academic Search Complete to begin.  

Search

Enter one or several search terms in the boxes. 
“AND” makes your search more specific, “OR” makes it more general. 

Example search: “social media” AND (teens OR adolescents) AND school AND success 

Filter and Refine

Use the filters and limiters, like “Peer Reviewed” and Publication Date, to help narrow down your results before looking through a huge list. 

For example: select Peer Reviewed and Last Five Years

Check your results: 

What kinds of results am I getting? How many? 
Is the information Informative for my topic? 
What keywords seem to be working best? 
What new keywords (Subject terms, synonyms) can I try?  Choose new keywords to change or add to your search.
Should I try narrower or broader terms? 

Citations

Note all Citation information (author, title, journal title, volume, issue, page numbers, etc.) for each source you think may be useful for the assignment.  You may be able to do this by emailing to yourself or downloading the information.

Evaluation

Ask yourself questions like these:

• Who are the authors of the works I have chosen? What is their expertise? 

• Who is the intended audience? 

• What is the purpose of the work I have found? What does it want to tell its reader? (is there bias/ is it propaganda?) 

• How does the work help my paper idea? 

• What part of my paper does it support? 

• Does this information change my thinking/writing? 

We all tend to live in our own bubbles these days, where our information sources echo back to us what we already know and agree with (think of your "For You" page). Information we agree with feels good.

Some resources are significantly more biased than others and can feed into skewed views of the world.

Reliability of sources is also very important.  Is the information presented true?

Here is a tool from Ad Fontes Media to help you find out about sources you may be accessing.

AI resources are quickly becoming a daily part of our lives.  A few things to think about when deciding to use AI for academic purposes.

Yes, it can be very easy to create things, but keep in mind:

• AI can "hallucinate" made up information by mashing stuff together.  For example, ChatGPT will create article citations, but they are not real things, just titles, journal titles, random page numbers and dates
• Specific facts and numbers tend to be incorrect in this same way.  Using AI to research facts does not (always) work.

You should consider that what it creates is realistic fiction (sounds real but might not be).

Using AI as a source of true information is problematic.  It can create falsities, and it cannot be refered back to (i.e. your readers/professors can't go back to see what you used as a source.) Using the same exact prompt will yield different results every time.

It can work fantastically as a starting point, for example, creating an outline.  It can also summarize large amounts of text fairly well (you are giving it a finite collection of data to summarize, so there isn't as much possiblity for incorrect mashups).

If you do use text generated by AI in your work, you must cite it as such.