The emergence of ChatGPT and other AI technologies has significantly transformed the landscape of library research, introducing complexities alongside innovative solutions. In our February 9th workshop, A Review of Generative AI Tools for Research, we explored the following platforms that can enhance your research mastery: Perplexity, Elicit, Consensus, Lateral, ScholarAI, Keenious, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Research Rabbit, and Scite. These tools are engineered to streamline your research workflow, making the process more efficient and effective.
Advantages
These research platforms can help the researcher find relevant papers without having to worry about a perfect keyword match or using Boolean operators. They offer summaries of research output from the topic specific to the question, and extract key information from the papers for further perusal and evaluation. These platforms can discover hidden relationships among papers since they examine the source more deeply than select fields in a library database. Last, they enhance your research workflow with such benefits as research and discovery, note-taking and organization, summarizing papers, performing meta-analyses, and writing assistance.
Limitations
At this stage, these platforms do have limitations. There are free and subscription-based models and you do get more with a subscription. Depending on your research demands, you may only need the free version. Research Rabbit, OpenAlex, and Semantic Scholar are free to use. Second, while the documents retrieved are sourced predominately from Semantic Scholar, hallucinations can creep into the process so you should always check your results. Last, there are gaps in what is not covered–subscription journals and paywalls–so using these platforms with your library databases will ensure that your are not missing relevant material.
Assistance
If you would like assistance with using these products, contact Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship, or Charles Gallagher, Research and Instruction Librarian.
Platforms Reviewed