Category: Information Skills

AberSkills. Your skills hub

WordPress User [abc27] Help & advice, Information Skills, Learning, Research Leave a comment

Do you want to develop your academic writing skills, learn about using the library and its resources, get to grips with referencing, or improve your employability skills?

Good news! These topics and more are covered in the Semester 1 AberSkills programme, which is available for free for all students at Aberystwyth University.

AberSkills Workshops take place throughout the academic year and are a mixture of face to face and online sessions. Most sessions are offered in both Welsh and English.

All workshops are listed on the AberSkills website. Take a look to see what’s available and book your place in a click.

If you miss a session and want to catch-up, academic skills and library workshop teaching materials for 2023-2024 are available on Blackboard under Organisations. 2024-2025 workshop teaching materials will be uploaded soon after the session.

AI and the Library – Week One. Our New Guide and Blog Post Series

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Your Subject Librarian team have been hard at work over the “summer” (seriously, did it ever stop raining?) to bring you a newly updated AI Guide which outlines how you can use AI to get the best out of the library’s resources.

AI and the Library

Screenshot from the new AI and the Library LibGuide

The Guide offers advice on:

  • How you might use AI.
  • Some of the AI tools that might be useful for you.
  • The benefits of using AI over traditional search engines.
  • The appropriate and ethical use of AI tools.
  • Effective prompt building.
  • Some of the potential risks of using AI (including issues around copyright infringement, bias, and data protection).
  • The impact of AI on academic integrity.

Links to the Guide can be found here:

As a companion to the Guide, we are going to offer a series of blog posts which will look at the advice given in the guide in more detail and offer some practical tips for using AI.

Here’s a sneak peek of what you can expect in the coming weeks:

  • Reviews of AI tools.
  • Practical advice on effective prompt building.
  • Developing smart keyword searches.
  • Discovering resources related to your area of study.
  • Evaluating AI outputs by applying the CRAAP test.
  • The risks of using AI.

We hope that you will find our Guide and the series of blog posts useful. It is important to stress that you must follow the guidelines on the use of AI issued by your department (where available).

Protecting your research: avoiding publication scams 

WordPress User [ssg] Help & advice, Information Skills, Learning, Research Leave a comment

Journal hijacking and fraudulent journal sites are becoming an increasing problem for journal authors, publishers and readers. Publishing scams aim to exploit researchers, promising quick publication but charging excessive publication fees. These sites can often be a clone of an established journal, set up to extract fees from unsuspecting authors. 

Publishers are becoming more increasingly aware of the problem and have taken steps to combat this new trend. Scopus academic database had 67 hijacked journals on its database by 2023 (Challenges posed by hijacked journals in Scopus – Abalkina – 2024 – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library ) To help alleviate this problem, Scopus removed URLs to all journal homepages that it indexes, although the problem persists (Retraction Watch, 2023 Elsevier’s Scopus deletes journal links following revelations of hijacked indexed journals – Retraction Watch) 

Many authors and readers are unaware of this practice and the following resources might be useful to consider. 

Evaluating journals: 

 
Support from your library: 

 
Contact us: librarians@aber.ac.uk  

2024 Graduates – Thursday 18th July

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Congratulations to our PhD and MPhil graduates today! Take a look at their theses on the links below

Tomos Fearn. Smart Wheelchairs: Semantic mapping and correct selection of goals within unconstrained environments http://hdl.handle.net/2160/455e10cb-6063-4685-a95d-d86bfe59b068

Arshad Sher. Automating gait analysis using a smartphone http://hdl.handle.net/2160/1fde6f15-4d5c-4336-ad77-49c163a95d9f

Kieran Stone. Predicting Hospital Length of Stay for Emergency Admissions to Enhance Patient Care http://hdl.handle.net/2160/563695e9-c555-42a1-b904-5cee0c3d863f

Joanne Hopkins. Coercive Control, Displaced Syrians and the Failure to Act http://hdl.handle.net/2160/c3011baa-7083-4443-8ef8-5efca3515710

Hannah Parry. Variation in issue prominence on the global health agenda: a comparative case study http://hdl.handle.net/2160/9e6deb5d-a540-450b-b889-dfe37dec85f2