Finding Computer Science Information Sources & Research
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CS 3997, Fall 2026
Hi! My name is Cat(herine)
It's my job to help you ensure you can find relevant, reliable information to support academic assignments.
I'm available via Teams/Email and split time between Head Hall and the HIL.
- Why learn search?
- Keyword VS semantic search
- How to search
- AI slop
- Zotero
- AI search tools
Today we're going to discuss:
- Many (most?) people use it for search and that's okay! I still think you need to understand the basics of information retrieval
- I would look out for
- Non-academic search tools - they may work as well in pulling relevant sources, but not reliable sources
- Hallucinations - if you're using a tool with RAG capabilities, it's less likely to make a source up entirely, but it may misrepresent a source
- We have tools like Consensus AI & Scopus AI through the library
A quick note on AI
Why learn search skills?
1
Help you find unbiased, reliable Information
2
Allow you to evaluate your research question
3
Are just an application of the basics of Computer Science
Because they....
Why learn search skills?
1
Help you find unbiased, reliable Information
Because they....
While GenAI tools can be very helpful, they have several limitations for research
- Their corpus is not necessarily curated, oftentimes including low-quality/predatory sources
- Recommendation algorithms, while helpful for things like Spotify/Netflix can be problematic when trying to capture unbiased research - you may just be fed results that confirm your biases/stance
- Bibliographic databases on the other hand, know nothing about you, and will provide every person who searches the same thing, the same results
Why learn search skills?
2
Allow you to evaluate your research question
Because they....
From an example with students last year:
But actually, no one had really researched exactly this topic - closest we could find was other forms of puzzles. Ended up pulling from psychology literature & CS studies with digital locks
Why learn search skills?
3
Are just an application of the basics of Computer Science
Because they....
- Bibliographic databases operate under Boolean logic - if you know the basics of coding, you can do advanced searching
- Literal search for only the tokens you put in
- If you search 'wife' variations like 'wives' will not be searched
- High level of specificity and control
- Harder to use
Keyword Search
Semantic Search
- Accounts for 'meaning' of terms, will search for variations
- If you search 'wife' search would include 'wives' 'spouse' 'partner'
- Less control, easy to use
- How search engines/AI tools work
Quick Pause:
Individual research contributions
Articles/Papers
Traditionally like magazines/books, now virtual collections of articles
Journals/Conferences
Libraries or collections of journals/conference proceedings/more
Article Databases
Bibliographic Databases
Curated, contain peer-reviewed or scholarly content
- wide breadth
- excellent for very general research questions
- not necessarily going to have all CS content
- Scopus, Web of Science, etc.
Multi-disciplinary
Discipline Specific
- curated to only contain works published by CS researchers or presented at CS conferences
- usually your go to option, ACM, IEEE
- Search using keywords
- Results are only returned if keyword appears in text
- No 'judgement' from system on what's relevant, it shows it all
Bibliographic Databases
"artificial intelligence" AND "diagnosis"
Other fun syntax!
| Name | Symbol | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quotation | "" | Searches for that phrase exactly | "graph theory" |
| Truncation | * | Searches for variations on this word | educat* |
| Proximity | N/3 or Near/3 or W/3 | Searches for kw within 3 (or n) words of each other | climate NEAR/2 change |
Example 1: IEEE Demo
How can predictive models support healthcare?
- If you have 500 results, you can't meaningfully review them all
- Filters can support you in doing this, by narrowing down type, recency, etc.
- Talk to me or your professor about which factors matter, some research areas, you want to cite article within last year, others you could cite a 20 year old article
A note on filtering:
Example 2: ACM Together
How does GenAI impact critical thinking?
Example 3: Students in ACM
Using ACM: Your advisor said they attended a fascinating poster session in Toronto on smart home security
Back to AI for a minute...
[a]
[b]
[c]
There are degrees of AI use
For the purposes of this conversation, I'm not talking about using Grammarly, I'm talking about using Chat/Claude to generate an entire paper
- Under the current system, researchers are incentivized to publish as much is possible
- They are busy people! Generally, the people who teach you are also expected to publish/run a research lab
- This has resulted in widespread academic misconduct
Why AI Slop in Academic Papers?
- I can't promise there's NO slop in legitimate databases, but they at least have mechanisms for identifying problems and retractions
A Note on Slop
- Check the journal website for:
- back issues
- editorial board
- indexing information
- promises of publication/short peer-review
Identifying Real Articles
- Check the article for:
- DOI
- glaring errors
- tortured phrases
- institutional emails
Identifying Real Articles
Identifying Slop
