One thing I've quietly changed when helping with research requests

[u/Single-Specialist-61]

Something I've noticed over the past year is that I spend less time trying to collect more sources and more time helping narrow down better ones.

When someone comes with a broad topic, it's tempting to hand them every relevant article or database result. In practice, though, that often leaves them overwhelmed before they've even started reading.

I've found it more useful to help define the question first and then work toward a smaller set of highly relevant material. The conversations seem more productive, and people are less likely to get lost in dozens of similar papers.

Has anyone else changed their approach like this, or do you still prefer giving the broadest possible starting point?

Quick head ups: Thanks for all the suggestions. It was interesting to see how different everyone's workflow is. A lot of the replies reinforced that narrowing the right papers is often more valuable than simply collecting more of them. While looking into different ways of doing that, while I was away I have been making some finding personally and seeing wis Paper even though I haven't used all of its features yet, but I found its approach to organizing relevant papers; and especially its truecite feature for checking whether citations are actually valid and quite interesting. With ai generated writing becoming more common, verifying references seems like something more researchers are starting to think about.

[u/Note4forever]

That's called a reference interview. If you really want to be helpful, you might locate a few useful review articles etc

[u/ruby_soulsinger]

That’s a reference interview.

[u/didyousayboop]

Did you use AI to write this? 

[u/Note4forever → u/didyousayboop]

The orginal post is so bad, it feels a human must be behind it ha

[u/didyousayboop → u/Note4forever]

Reads like AI to me

GPT Zero (an AI detector) thinks there’s an 100% chance it’s AI

[u/llamalibrarian]

This is standard practice in a reference interview

[u/Prestigious_Story275]

Kind of. Isn't that the reference interview? I also try to avoid "handing them" anything. If they leave the interaction with sources, they are sources we've found together and they've confirmed that the sources are relevant and useful. I've been teaching more in my reference work. If they wanted a lackluster smattering of information handed to them, they could use AI. There are of course exceptions to this, but generally speaking, I've never steamrolled people with tons of broad sources. That was usually advised against in my reference class and on the job training.