AI tools are changing the academic information landscape – this also affects scientific searching for reliable information.
A conscious and critical approach to AI tools is essential. The results of an AI-based literature search should be scrutinised and if necessary, compared with other search methods.
Numerous AI tools are currently available for information searching. There are significant differences between the tools, which must be taken into account.
Here are a few distinguishing features:
It is important when searching for academic information, that the results are generated from academic and reliable sources and include references.
Many tools use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to extract information from selected documents. Academic publications are searched for as an answer to a user question using scientific search engines and in specialist databases and used as sources for generating the answer. In addition to these conceptual differences, there are of course also differences in quality, i.e. the quality of the answers varies greatly.