Research Tutorial

Academic Integrity: A commitment to six fundamental values of honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage in all aspects of academic work and life.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Technology that allows computers to imitate human intelligence and accomplish human-like tasks.

• Generative AI: AI tools that generate text, images, or video based on a prompt.

Academic Misconduct: Any action that results in a breach of the principles of academic integrity. Common forms of academic misconduct include cheating and plagiarism.

Background Research: Research done to have a basic understanding of a topic, including key ideas or themes. Background research might include learning about the context of an issue, key words or phrases used to discuss the topic, names of people or organizations, and specific issues or subtopics within that topic.

Boolean Operators: A set of commands used in library databases to tell the computer exactly how to search for your keywords.

• The most common operators are AND, OR, and NOT.

Database: An organized collection of information. Databases can be general collections or be more subject-specific.

Information Need: The information a person wants or needs in order to answer a question or complete a task.

Peer Review: A formal process used to check the quality of information in an article before it is published.

• Double-Blind Peer Review: The most robust form of peer review. An article is reviewed by two separate experts. Double-blind refers to the fact that both the author(s) and the reviewer(s) are anonymous, so that the experts can review the information more objectively.

Plagiarism: The act of presenting someone else's ideas, words, charts, graphics, or calculations as your own without referring to the original author. The most common form of academic misconduct.

Publication Timeline: The length of time it takes for different types of sources to be published after an event takes place. The timeline ranges from the moment the event occurs to multiple year afterwards. Some types of sources cover multiple steps in the publication timeline.

Researcher Bias: Intentional or unintentional skewing of data, results, or analyses because of the researcher or author's preconceived ideas about the topic. 

• Confirmation Bias: When a researcher selectively chooses resources that support or confirm their pre-existing understanding of a subject and they ignore evidence that disagrees with their beliefs. 

Unless otherwise noted, this guide is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License).