Artificial Intelligence (AI) Guide

Topics

• Research Question Formulation
• Identifying Benchmark/Seed Articles
• Research Protocol Development
• Finding Research Funding

Limitations

• What is the corpus of the tool? Do they exclusively search open-access content? Are they transparent about which sources they draw information from—web resources, published articles, preprints, etc.? Many AI tools search Semantic Scholar or OpenAlex, which have wide coverage, but do not offer the same breadth of coverage as the library's bibliographic databases.
• Recognize these tools are starting points, assisting you with finding background information, identifying benchmark articles, and formulating a foreground research question. They are not a substitute for traditional literature searches.
• Do not become overdependent on AI. Apply your creativity and critical thinking to the development of ideas.
• AI may oversimplify complex disciplinary frameworks in specialized fields or struggle with interdisciplinary connections and cultural subtleties.

Why These, Not Those?

• Most chatbots be can be utilized for this research task, but we recommended Copilot due to UTSW enterprise agreement and integration with other Microsoft 365 applications. No identifiable patient, student, or employee data permitted even in the enterprise version.
• Scopus and Pivot are trusted library databases. The content goes through a formal vetting process, and can be trusted more than other AI, which may search general web content, be less controlled, and be less transparent about their corpora and processes.
• You can receive more support for the use of these tools through consultation with a librarian or vendor support lines.

Note: All AI can hallucinate, provide poor quality outputs, or oversimplify complex topics. Apply critical analysis to any output.

Use the ROBOT test to evaluate AI tools.

You can ask the AI to do the following:

• Restructure your question to fit the PICO(M) or another framework.
• Develop inclusion/exclusion criteria for your given research topic.
• Provide a list of terms (synonyms, alternate spellings, etc.) you can incorporate into your search. Ask the AI to separate them by PICO(M) components.
• Develop an initial search string for a database. The AI may struggle with subject headings and database syntax, so please evaluate and adjust your search to fit the database requirements. You may need to be very specific in your prompting.

Check out other chatbots for these processes.

A database that allows you to find, track, and manage research funding opportunities for your projects.

• Semantic Search option – AI-powered contextual natural language available in the Advanced Search interface. The search is less precise, but it may uncover relevant opportunities not found using traditional search methods.
• Funding entries also include AI-generated titles and summaries to further evaluate relevance.
• Funding Matcher - Uses keywords and information from your scholarly profile to recommend funding opportunities that are relevant to your interests.

Proquest Ebook Central is an online platform that provides access to ebooks. We have subscriptions to a select collection of books, viewable through the library link.

• Research Assistant – Appears when you access the online copies of subscribed/owned titles. It generates an LLM description of the book for further evaluation. It can also show the Key Takeaway and Concepts, important ideas with explanations draw from the selected chapter itself, summarizing the content for digest and assessment.
• Textbooks may be useful for gathering background knowledge on a research topic before developing a foreground research question.

Scopus is a multidisciplinary database.

• Scopus AI – Pulls from the Scopus research corpus, specifically the abstracts, to generate summaries and provide insights on a given topic or question. It will also product concepts maps and identify subject experts and emerging themes. It will translate your query into a Boolean keyword search. Although not complete, this string can be a good starting point for a literature search. The Deep Research option will generate a multi-page report with more citations. You can view the AI's "thought" process. Scopus AI will search pull literature from 2003 onward. It is may not identify historical, seminal articles.