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Find the Type of Information You Need

It is important to know what kind of information will be the most helpful for you as you start to look for it. Do you need to provide researched evidence to prove an idea true or false? Are you trying to find community organizations that work in the field you want to write about?

Consider the different types of information sources, what their purpose is, and what you need to learn from the information in your sources.

If you don't know much about a topic, start with general or background information sources and then use what you learned there to look for more specific information sources. The subject-specific library guides at MRU Library will all have a tab related to Background Sources for that specific subject, so that can be a good place to look.

 

What's a Subject Guide?

In your university time, you will probably hear about subject guides in sessions led by librarians and in your interactions with library staff at the service desk. What exactly is a subject guide, and why is it important to know how to find a specific one?

You can think of a subject guide as a curated, one-stop shop of different information sources and search tips related to a specific subject. 

Every subject guide at MRU Library is actively maintained by a subject librarian that has special expertise in that subject area. The subject librarian for your subject has selected specific information sources for your subject. On the guide, they might have also created specific sections related to special topics associated with that subject, and they might also provide disciplinary citation information if scholars working with that subject typically use a specific citation style.

Searching for Information on a Topic

Learn how to search for books and articles using MRU LibrarySearch on the library homepage. For guidance on how to combine search terms, see How do I use Boolean search operators?. 

For subject-specific databases and specialized resources, use our Subject Guides and A-Z Databases list.

How to Find a Subject Guide

Learn how to find specific items using MRU LibrarySearch on the library homepage.

Finding Specific Books and Articles

Learn how to find a specific subject guide starting from the library homepage.

Using Generative Artificial Intelligence to Search for Information

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is an evolving topic with many different sides to it including information search and retrieval.

Always refer to your course syllabus or specific assignment details to see what your instructor has identified as permitted uses of GenAI in their course.

If your instructor permits GenAI use for finding and/or summarizing information sources, here are some tips for doing so effectively.

  • If you are using a general purpose GenAI chatbot like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, look at the different modes available and choose "Web search" or "Deep research" mode to ensure that you are more likely to find real sources and not "hallucinated" or fabricated, non-existent sources.
  • Consider whether a general purpose GenAI chatbot is the best to use for your search task. There are other, more targeted options like Consensus, Elicit, Undermind, and ResearchRabbit that may suit your task better. (Keep in mind, however, that many of these tools operate according to a "freemium" model where only limited features may be available to free users.)
  • If GenAI successfully finds sources and summarizes them for you, be sure to examine the sources to see how GenAI has represented them. Do the citation details provided correspond to the actual source? Has the GenAI tool represented each source accurately and faithfully?
  • Keep in mind the potential limitations of using a GenAI tool for research. These include the following:
    • Not all information exists in digital format, and, therefore, what you are looking for may not be available to GenAI for it to find and summarize.
      • For example, if you are researching for a history course, print books and archival material may still be very important to consult.
    • Not all digital sources are available to general purpose GenAI chatbots like ChatGPT. Some very valuable information is what is called "paywalled," meaning that it is only available to you after you have logged in through MRU Library to prove that you are a paying student at MRU.
      • For example, a business database like Euromonitor's Passport Global Market Information Database is an example of a paywalled database where the company does not want its highly valuable information circulating freely on the open internet, and you will not find Passport's reports through a GenAI search tool.
    • The information that GenAI tools have been trained on is predominantly English language materials related to life in the Global North. As a result, there is the potential for linguistic and regional bias in the tools' results.
  • Cite any information you get from a GenAI tool using the GenAI citation template in the corresponding style guide that you are using. For examples of the relevant templates in MRU's style guides:

License

Much of the content on this Academic Research Skills guide has been adapted from the University of Alberta Library, which shared its guide content under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.