Epidemiology: Research Ethics & Development: EPID 5011/5013

In my experience, AI Tools do not work very well for Literature Reviews on their own.

However, they can be a good addition to using discipline specific academic databases. 

In most fields there are discipline specific database includes considerably more of the scholarly literature in that field.  This means that even if you just need a few Articles, you have a better chance of finding GOOD articles, related to your specific topic, using a tool specifically designed to search the scholarly literature.  

This is for 2 reasons:  

1. Knowledge Base

• AI Tools have a limited Knowledge Base - Each AI tool has a knowledge base that it has been trained on and that it uses to answer your questions.  T
  • AI tools do not have access to all, or even a significant portion, of the scholarly literature in a field, 
  • Some AI tools cannot even search the live public internet. 
• Scholarly Databases have extensive Knowledge bases - Each scholarly database has created its universe of the scholarly literature and tells you what is included. 
  • Scholarly Databases in specific fields often include a significant percentage of the literature in a field. 
  • They do not search the public internet - they have intentionally created a knowledge base over time that includes much more than what is on the public internet  

2. Value Added Subject Indexing -

• AI Tools do not add subject indexing to the citations that they have access to. They can recombine things to generate new text, but for searching, they can only use what is in their knowledge base or on the live web in some cases. 
• Scholarly Databases do add subject indexing to their citations -they add discipline specific subject headings and tags for things like Document types, Substances used or Population Groups. 
  • This provides many more access points for any given article - so it is more likely to come up in your search.
  •   Example - 
    • A search in an AI tool or Google for articles on Health Equity Race you would be likely to only find articles that used those terms in the title or abstract.  Many relevant articles would use different terminology in their title 
    • A search in a discipline specific database like PubMed - gives you many more relevant articles because they have a subject heading for Health Equity - that is applied to articles on that topic regardless of what words were in the title.  

Use a recommended Academic Database for research anytime you need:

• All the articles on a topic 
• The best articles on a topic 
• Narrowly focused articles
• The latest articles on a topic 
• Specific types of articles - Review articles, Synthesis articles, Patents, Clinical trials... 
• All the articles out of a specific Research Group

Does that mean never use an AI tool for Literature Searching?   No

AI Tools are getting better knowledge bases all the time, and the thing that they have that is different from the Academic Databases is a different sort of algorithm and better natural language processing.   This means that even though their Knowledge Bases are usually smaller, things can pop us that did not bubble up to the top of your academic database search.

So, consider using them in addition to discipline specific Academic Databases