At this stage of their development, most generative AI tools are not great at recommending specific sources for a specific research topic. If you ask a tool like ChatGPT for such recommendations, it will certainly give you some. However, some of these sources will not be real.
The better use for ChatGPT or a similar tool when it comes to finding information is to instead ask it for help with your search strategy.
If you’re searching for information in a library database, you’ll need to identify keywords related to your research topic in order to search. These keywords break your topic down into a few key concepts to help the database match your search terms to items within the database.
Example prompt: I am a first year undergraduate student researching the role of newspapers in shaping regional identities. What are some keywords I can use to search for my topic in a library database?
Below is the response ChatGPT gave the author of this guide in response to the above prompt:
This is a long list! It may have helped to specify the number of terms needed in the original prompt to help make the list more concise but even though there is more here than you would actually need to use, there is also a lot that you might not have thought of on your own that can point you in some interesting directions for your search.
The next step is to identify the most useful or relevant keywords (maybe 3-5) and use them to search a library database for information on your topic. You can experiment with different combinations to narrow or expand your search or to cover different angles of the topic.
Try a similar prompt to generate a list of keywords for a research topic you're working on.
