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LibrarySearch Research Assistant: About LibrarySearch Research Assistant

Survey Request

 Please fill-in our Research Assistant Feedback Survey

First check...

Only use AI tools if permitted in your assessment guidelines and verify all information retrieved. 

If using LibrarySearch Research Assistant in your assessments, you should adhere to the University’s Student guide to using artificial intelligence tools in assessment plus any further instructions on your module assignments.

Trusting the Research Assistant?

It is well known that AI tools can sometimes fail by fabricating or hallucinating content, which is a challenge in academic work.

The LibrarySearch Research Assistant greatly reduces this risk, as the tool must base its answer on abstracts or summaries from five sources from within LibrarySearch, rather than on its own knowledge from the tool's training data.

You are provided with links to the five sources so you can check the source of the information yourself.  The Research Assistant could have some limitations, so check the information for any possible errors or bias before using it in your work and assignments.

The Assistant also reserves the right not to answer if the sources do not meet the requirements or if there are too few sources to provide a proper answer.

LibrarySearch Research Assistant

LibrarySearch Research Assistant is a search tool that is powered by generative AI. It's designed to help you find and explore academic content on LibrarySearch.

The Assistant complements traditional information searching. It's particularly useful for getting started quickly, for example, to explain a concept you don't know much about, or to provide an introduction to a subject area. 

How does it work?

  • The Research Assistant is embedded within LibrarySearch
  • Select the Research Assistant from the righthand side of the top menu in LibrarySearch home page

  • You will be asked to login
  • Ask a question in ordinary language, for example: what was the understanding of science in medieval Scotland?
  • It identifies five documents that can help answer your question and displays these in the sources section
  • It extracts the most relevant information from the description/abstracts of each source to write an overview
  • When available it links to the full text of sources, or offers our Document Delivery services
  • You can use the sources to delve deeper into a topic
  • Use the “view more results in your library search” button to find more documents relevant to your question
  • It offers search suggestions to expand topics and explore further
  • You can view previous sessions’ questions, allowing you to build on work

 

Example Search

For example, if you enter this question:

How does vitamin D deficiency impact overall health?

After a few seconds, you see links to the top 5 sources, followed by an Overview summary

 

If you click on one of the sources you see the paper title and abstract. There may also be ‘Download PDF’ or ‘Full Text Online’ options

If ‘Download PDF’ or ‘Full Text Online’ options don’t appear, you can choose ‘More Details and Request Options’ – this takes you to our traditional LibrarySearch record

 

In the Research Assistant results you can also choose the option to: “View more results from your library search”

This runs the search it had created in LibrarySearch and shows all the results in LibrarySearch.

Feedback Survey

We are currently piloting LibrarySearch Research Assistant and would love to know your views. 

Please fill-in our brief feedback survey

Beta Version

We are currently using a Beta version of the Research Assistant.

This means it is a new, experimental version. 

The Assistant will continue to be developed and new features added.

More on literature searching

For further information on literature searching, and databases for your subject area, see the Library Subject guides