Find Sources - UGS 303: Ethics of Artificial Intelligence - Profs. Kubala and Mahowald - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Find Sources through the Libraries

Library databases and Google can't be searched the same way so take a few moments to come up with a search strategy before diving into a database.

Step 1: Think about the key concepts of your topic and search those instead of an entire phrases or sentences.

Step 2: Think of other terms you could use that are synonyms or related (they could be a broader or narrower aspect). This often requires that you do a little background research to learn more.

Step 3: Connect your terms using AND and OR:

Remember -

AND narrows your topic (use AND between terms if you want them all to appear in your results)
OR broadens your topic (use OR between terms if you want any, not all, to appear in your results)

Generate Keywords from a Topic

This tool can help you create search terms and formulate an effective search.

Libraries Search Box
Search across many of the Libraries electronic and print resources at once. Includes articles, books, ebooks and more.

Academic Search Complete
Find scholarly and non-scholarly articles from across disciplines
Google Scholar
Use GoogleScholar through this guide or the library website to search for scholarly articles with a Google search and be connected to library subscriptions instead of being asked to pay.

Education Source
Education
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)
Linguistics
PsycINFO (Ebsco)
Psychology
Includes abstracts from Psychological Abstracts back to 1927, Psychological Bulletin from 1921-1926, and all APA journals and the American Journal of Psychology back to their first issues. Corresponds in part to the print index Psychological Abstracts.
Science and Technology
Science and technology
SocINDEX with Full Text
Social Sciences

Databases by Discipline
Find other databases based on discipline.

If you don’t see a .pdf of the article you want, click Find it at UT to find it in another database or in print in the Libraries.

If it is only in print in the Libraries or we don’t own the article, click Get a Scan to have the article emailed to you, usually within 5 days.

Google Better

Use a site-limited Google search to hone your search to types of sites:

Limit by type of domain (.org, .gov, .edu) with the syntax site:.domain
example: artificial intelligence maternal health site:.org

Use a site-limited Google search to search within a site:

example: artificial intelligence maternal health site:cdc.gov = searches for the words on the CDc website

Use quotation marks to keep words together as a phrase:

example: "maternal health" = searches for maternal and health next to each other

Use the minus sign to eliminate something irrelevant from my search results:

example: -site:.com = no .com sites will come up in your search
example:maternal health -covid = no results mentioning covid will come up

Doing Research with Gen AI Chatbots

Ask for citations or links and then verify they exist. Althought they are getting better, AI chatbots sometimes "hallucinate" sources, meaning they make up sources that don't exist.
If you are going to use the information generated by a chatbot, be sure to cite it. Here are some ways to cite in MLA, APA and Chicago style. You may want to save what was generated because it is not reproducible. That menas the reader cannot use the citation to get back to the information you used unless you provide it.
Just as you should do with any source of information, evaluate it. In the case of chatbot generated content, you should read about the topic in other sources to make sure it aligns.
Be aware of what is and is not included in the data corpus used to train the chatbot and make sure the timeframe and type of information it is trained on matches your information need. Chatbots like ChatGPT and MicrosoftCoPilot that are trained on the open web do not include information behind a paywall, which is where the majority of scholarly information can be found.
If you want scholary information and are ok with it only including the portion that isn't behind a paywall, rather than using a general chatbot, consider using a generative AI tool specifically created to search non-paywalled scholarly information, such as Consensus, Elicit or ResearchRabbit.