Answered By Library Staff
Last Updated: Sep 11, 2024     Views: 70

For finding results from websites, you can use Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, or Google’s Gemini. These tools combine a language model with a source of facts, like web search results. They search the web and use the AI to summarize the text from those web pages, giving you links to where each part of the summary was found. 

It’s a good idea to visit those web pages instead of only reading the summary, because it’s still possible for the AI to make errors in those summaries. These tools “hallucinate” less often than tools like the free version of ChatGPT because of this connection to a source of facts. But they can still make mistakes.

For finding results from academic papers, it’s always best to begin with library resources. However, there are some tools that combine an AI language model with a database of scholarly papers. Elicit is one example. It searches Semantic Scholar and uses AI to summarize results from the journal articles it finds. 

With Elicit, you may find some results that you didn’t find with library databases. That’s because Elicit uses semantic searching rather than keyword searching: it can find papers discussing similar concepts even if matching keywords don’t appear. But remember that library databases and Google Scholar index many more journals, so it’s best to use multiple tools if you want to be comprehensive.

 

Tasks that involve searching

For any of these tasks... Use any of these free tools
  • Finding and summarizing websites that answer your question
     
  • Asking questions or getting a summary of information on a specific website
    Example: Please summarize this: [your link here]

These summarize results from web search and link to the sources.
  • Finding scholarly articles
     
  • Summarizing a particular scholarly article
     
  • Asking questions of a particular scholarly article
     
  • Uploading the PDF of a scholarly article and asking questions or getting a summary.

Start with library databases and Google Scholar. 
Their coverage is more comprehensive than the tools below.

Then try these additional tools.
Use these to find additional sources that may not have appeared with keyword searching. They use semantic searching, some of them based on Semantic Scholar, others on OpenAlex.

They also include generative AI features, like natural language queries, summarizing, outlining, etc.

These are not 100% free, as most have usage limits.

Creative Commons 4.0 license
This answer adapted under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License from the University of Arizona Libraries and their guide.

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