There is a vast amount of information available. You will need to decide which sources are reliable and suitable for use in your assignments.
The sources you should read and reference depend on your subject. For example, in Education you might cite Government policy alongside books and articles. In medical and health-related courses you need to cite the latest research and evidence. Humanities courses can rely more on primary sources.
Broadly speaking, you should aim to cite more academic textbooks and peer-reviewed journal articles than commercial websites, blogs and news articles. Your resource list and lecture materials give a good starting point. You then need to expand your knowledge and understanding by doing your own reading.
Using your resource list as a starting point, try to read widely enough that you get a feel for the balance of literature on your subject. Where does the source you are looking at fit within the broad body of work? Are you reading something that reflects mainstream research, or something that sits in opposition to the main school of thought? How will you communicate this in your assignment? See web literacy for student fact checkers for much more detail.
The quality and reliability of different information sources varies enormously. Evaluation checklists like the CRAP test, ABC test and RADAR help you decide whether a source is worth reading and citing in your work.
Ask yourself about:
Does the source help answer your assignment question?
There are several tools which can help you to fact-check sources you find online.
AI searches freely available websites. For example, this search on Perplexity.ai gives Wikipedia and a range of tech and marketing companies:
As with any search, you need to evaluate the information you find. Is it relevant to your assignment? Is it accurate? Who wrote it? Why? How old is it? It is unlikely any of the sources above would be good citations in an assignment. Most academic journal articles or ebooks are behind paywalls, so AI search results won’t be able to include this information. AI may not always be searching the most recent information. Frequently, AI doesn’t reveal where its information came from, making it very difficult to evaluate. Where possible, you should visit the individual source sites to decide for yourself.
AI is not neutral. Just like any other source of information, it can be biased, inaccurate or discriminatory. It can also use the works of others without acknowledgement or permission. For example, this Perplexity.ai generated text names sources, but doesn’t cite them in the answer. In academic work, that’s plagiarism.
AI generated text could be helpful in explaining the basics of a topic and suggesting good search keywords. It is not something you can directly cite, and it is unlikely to lead you to good quality sources to read and reference.
AI outputs can be poor quality. You will find inaccurate information and fake references to sources that do not exist. You should always fact check any information AI gives you.
riticise/ challenge the information AI gives you
cknowledge use of AI
ecord your search processes
xpand your research beyond AI