Welcome to your back-to-school toolkit for the new academic year
As an educational charity and not-for-profit publisher, we are here to support you in helping students build confidence with research, navigate new technologies, and succeed in their academic work.
Explore our collection of free, ready-to-use resources and templates — designed to be easily integrated into your own training materials. We're also pleased to offer complimentary training sessions, either as standalone webinars or incorporated into your existing student workshops. Simply get in touch and we will get you booked in.
AI Literacy & Generative AI Tools
Equip your students to use AI tools thoughtfully, avoid plagiarism, and strengthen information literacy.
We recently added a new module on AI to our renowned best practice guide for effective literature searching. Read the module.
Report: Embracing Generative AI in Research & Teaching
A thought leadership report to help you understand how generative AI is reshaping student research habits — and how librarians and faculty can respond.
5 Tactics for Teaching AI in Information Literacy
Five practical, invaluable strategies to help students critically evaluate AI-generated content, avoid plagiarism, and use generative tools more thoughtfully.
Generative AI Instructional Toolkit
Ready to use seminar and classroom resources, including lesson plans (like “Find the Fake Citation”), handouts, and FAQs. Use in library sessions or embed into research skills teaching.
Sharpening information literacy skills
Expert guidance and activities you can use in your own training sessions to help students build confidence and proficiency with library resources.
Read the best practice guide on LibGuides. Feel free to incorporate any or all of it into your own library guide - we only ask you cite us as the source..png "University student photos (1)")
FSTA Training and Support
With tailored versions for EBSCO, Ovid and Web of Science, our quick-start guides and videos help students get the best results when searching the FSTA - Food Science and Technology Abstracts database.
Build awareness amongst your library users
Our ready-to-use promotional toolkit has been updated for the new academic year. We provide a range of materials including screensavers for your library computers, downloadable posters, social media templates and more. Explore the resources.
Predatory Journals Awareness
Ready-to-use materials and information that will help students understand what predatory journals are and how they operate, so they know how to recognise and avoid predatory publishing.
Embed this into your training using our explainer video and curated hub.
We keep predatory journals out of FSTA
Every journal considered for inclusion in FSTA is evaluated against a rigorous 60-point checklist to identify and exclude predatory or unethical publishing practices. This ensures that only high-quality, peer-reviewed, and relevant content is indexed, giving you and your students confidence in the integrity of the database. Learn more.
When students search FSTA via your university library, they can trust that their results are free from predatory journals. However, for comprehensive literature reviews, students often search additional databases that may not apply the same level of scrutiny.
To support quality assurance across broader searches, your users can access our free Journal Look Up Service, which allows them to check whether a journal is indexed in FSTA and meets IFIS’s strict quality criteria.
Get in touch
If you have any feedback, questions, or if there is anything you feel you need that we don’t offer in the list above, please email Angela as your direct contact here at IFIS. We are here to help!
Book a Free Webinar or Workshop
Invite our team to deliver a free customised session for your students, faculty, or librarians.
Topics include generative AI literacy; research and literature searching; avoiding predatory journals; and FSTA database training.