LIS2004 – Research Strategies for College Students is a short information literacy course, most commonly 1 credit, teaching students to find, evaluate, and ethically use information for academic work. It is typically delivered by library faculty and is frequently offered fully online.
The course exists because the skill it teaches is no longer intuitive. Students arrive able to search — they have done it since childhood — but searching a library database is not searching the open web, and evaluating a source in an environment of algorithmic recommendation, content farms, predatory journals, and AI-generated text is a learned discipline rather than a matter of common sense.
Content follows the research process: understanding the information cycle and how knowledge is produced and disseminated; developing a workable topic and research question; building search strategies using keywords, controlled vocabulary, Boolean operators, and database limiters; distinguishing source types — scholarly, popular, trade, primary, secondary; evaluating sources for authority, accuracy, currency, purpose, and bias; and citing ethically in APA, MLA, or Chicago style while understanding plagiarism and academic integrity.
Most versions also cover the practical mechanics students actually need: navigating the college's databases, using interlibrary loan, managing citations, and knowing when to ask a librarian.
The course is offered at approximately 19 Florida institutions, predominantly state colleges — College of Central Florida, College of the Florida Keys, Daytona State, Eastern Florida State, Florida SouthWestern, Gulf Coast State, Indian River State, Lake-Sumter, Miami Dade, North Florida, Northwest Florida State, Pensacola State, Santa Fe, South Florida State, St. Petersburg, State College of Florida, Seminole State, and Tallahassee State.
This is a general academic skills course rather than an occupational one. Its value is in supporting every subsequent course a student takes and in transferring to professional work where evaluating information is part of the job:
Credit value varies and should be checked: Seminole State lists LIS2004 at 1 credit, and other Florida institutions offer versions at 2 or 3 credits with correspondingly more depth. Titles vary too — Research Strategies for College Students, Digital Research Strategies (Miami Dade), and Introduction to Internet Research are all in use. Under SCNS the same number at the same level is equivalent regardless of title, but the credit difference affects degree audits, so confirm when transferring.
LIS2004 is commonly an elective, and at some institutions it satisfies a general education or computer/information literacy requirement. Because credit value varies, students should confirm how their institution applies it before relying on it to fill a specific requirement.
Most institutions require no prerequisite beyond college-level reading and writing placement. The course is frequently recommended alongside or before ENC1101, since composition assignments assume the research skills it teaches.
The practical advice: this course is most valuable in a student's first term, because every later course assumes the skills. Students commonly take it after struggling with a research paper, which is later than optimal. Advisors at several Florida colleges pair it with ENC1101 for that reason.
Generative AI has changed the research landscape this course teaches, and information literacy instruction has become one of the places institutions address it most directly.
Where AI helps. Language models are genuinely useful early in the research process: brainstorming and narrowing a topic, suggesting search terms and synonyms a student would not have thought of, explaining unfamiliar disciplinary vocabulary, and summarizing a dense article to decide whether it is worth reading closely. Some library discovery tools now incorporate AI-assisted search and summarization.
Where AI fails, and why it matters here specifically. Language models fabricate citations — producing plausible author names, titles, journals, volume numbers, and DOIs for articles that do not exist. This is the single most consequential failure mode for a research course, it happens routinely, and students have submitted bibliographies full of invented sources without realizing it. Models also cannot reliably assess source credibility, have training cutoffs that make them unsuitable for current information, and reproduce whatever bias exists in their training data. Every citation an AI produces must be verified to exist in a real database before it is used.
The student's responsibility. The skill this course teaches — evaluating whether a source is real, credible, and appropriate — is precisely the skill AI cannot outsource, and it has become more necessary rather than less. A student who cannot verify a citation cannot safely use these tools.
Academic integrity. Policies vary by institution and instructor and are evolving quickly; students must follow the syllabus in front of them and should expect the rules to differ between courses. The defensible principle: AI is appropriate for developing and refining a search, and inappropriate as a source in itself or as a substitute for reading and evaluating what it points to. Citing an AI model as a source for a factual claim misunderstands both citation and the tool.
Generated August 31, 2026 · Updated August 31, 2026