AI-assisted search

Lib4RI holds institutional subscriptions to Consensus and scite.ai which we recommend as your starting point, since they give all affiliates of Eawag, Empa, PSI and WSL full access without requiring a personal paid plan. General-purpose assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude are also useful, especially when connected to these academic engines.

Consensus and scite.ai

Consensus is an AI-based academic search engine that searches across a large corpus of peer-reviewed literature (drawing on Semantic Scholar) and synthesises what the papers actually report. You can ask a research question in plain language, and it returns an evidence-based summary with the underlying references, including an indication of whether the literature broadly agrees or is divided on a point. It is particularly useful for obtaining a quick, sourced overview of a topic and for understanding the weight of evidence behind a claim.

scite.ai focuses on citations and how publications are received by the research community. For any given paper or claim it shows not just how often something is cited, but whether citing articles support, mention, or contrast it, and where in the citing article the reference appears. This «Smart Citation» view can be useful for assessing how a finding has been received and discussed in the research community. scite.ai also includes the «Scite Assistant», an AI research assistant that answers questions grounded in references, with the ability to specify both the sources to draw on and the form of the output.

Quick lookup of individual items

When you simply need to find, verify or understand a single article, dataset or other item, both tools work well as a fast first port of call:

  • Paste a claim, a sentence, or a question into Consensus to find the specific papers that address it and read a concise synthesis of their findings.
  • Enter a title, DOI or claim into scite.ai to pull up a paper together with its Smart-Citation profile - a quick way to judge whether a result has held up, been contested or been superseded.
  • Use the Scite Assistant or Consensus to get a plain-language explanation of an unfamiliar paper or concept before deciding whether it is worth reading in full.

This is the right mode for ad-hoc, low-stakes questions where you want an answer in seconds rather than an exhaustive, documented search.

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Topic exploration and systematic search support

For broader work, such as scoping a new project, refining a research question, or preparing the evidence base for a review, these tools can support the early stages of a systematic search (see also our page on systematic literature search).

AI-assisted search can help you discover relevant literature, but it does not guarantee comprehensive retrieval. Important papers may be missed, and the selection of results may depend on the tool's underlying databases, sources and algorithms.

  • Use Consensus to map a topic, identify the main lines of evidence and areas of disagreement, and gather an initial set of key references and terminology.
  • Use scite.ai to follow citation networks outward from seminal papers, identify influential and contested work, and spot clusters of supporting or contrasting evidence.
  • Use either tool to help extract the underlying concepts, synonyms, and related terms that you will then combine with Boolean operators and truncation into reproducible search strings for databases such as Scopus or Web of Science.

AI-assisted tools can therefore complement, rather than replace, conventional database searching throughout the research process. A genuinely systematic search must be comprehensive, transparent, and conducted according to a predefined protocol to ensure reproducibility. The formal search should therefore still be conducted and documented in established databases.

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Connecting ChatGPT and Claude to Consensus and scite.ai

General-purpose assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude are helpful for brainstorming, rephrasing search questions, and explaining results in plain language. On their own, however, they can produce plausible-sounding but non-existent references («hallucinations»), so they should not be trusted for factual literature retrieval without grounding.

Both Consensus and scite.ai can be connected to these assistants - for example through Consensus's GPT and connector integrations, or scite.ai's assistant integrations - so that the assistant's answers are grounded in real, retrievable papers rather than in its training data alone. When used this way, you get the conversational convenience of ChatGPT or Claude with the evidential backing of Lib4RI's subscribed academic engines. Whenever you rely on a general assistant for literature searching, always verify the references against an authoritative database.

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Best practice in prompting

A few simple habits can make a significant difference to the quality of AI-assisted search results:

  • Be specific. State your topic, population or system, intervention or variable and outcome of interest rather than relying on a single broad keyword. A focused question is more likely to yield focused evidence.
  • Use natural-language questions for Consensus and the Scite Assistant - they are designed for this purpose - but use structured search queries for traditional databases, making use of Boolean operators, truncation, wildcards and other database-specific techniques where appropriate.
  • Ask for sources and check them. Request that the tool cite its references, then confirm the papers exist and that they support the claims made. Where possible, check the original papers rather than relying on an AI-generated summary alone. Treat any unverified claim as a lead to investigate, not a conclusion.
  • Iterate. Refine your prompt based on the first results - narrow the scope, add synonyms, exclude off-topic areas, or ask the tool to focus on a particular method, period or discipline.
  • Record your prompts. Keep a record of the prompts you use, especially when an AI-assisted search informs a structured literature search or literature review. This helps you revisit, refine and document your search process.
  • Mind the limits. AI search tools do not cover the entire scientific literature. Their results depend on the databases, publishers and other sources they have access to, as well as on their coverage and date range. Important papers may therefore be missed, so do not rely on a general chatbot alone for factual retrieval.
  • Use AI ethically. Keep your own judgement in the loop, respect academic integrity, and remember that the responsibility for what you cite remains yours.
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Other AI-assisted search tools

Beyond our subscribed tools, many other AI-assisted discovery tools exist. We do not hold subscriptions to these and they are listed for orientation, not as recommendations; free and paid tiers vary, and the field changes quickly. More comprehensive lists of AI tools can, for example, be found at aitoolshunt.com or A Snapshot of GenAI Tools for Research.

If you find a tool you value that is not listed, we would like to hear about it. Please get in touch.

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