(3 Jan 2024) In the year since ChatGPT brought AI mainstream, the technology landscape has exploded with apps and bots that do more than mimic human intelligence and hallucinate electric sheep. Gary Price is a leader in advocating for better AI tools for librarians, researchers, and students (check out his presentations at Charleston and CNI this fall)—so I asked him, what are his…
New tools show promise, but technical and legal barriers may hinder widespread use (21 Nov 2023) In today’s world, where scientific research is rapidly growing, new AI tools like Elicit or Scim are being developed to help researchers sort through and understand large numbers of academic papers. However, these tools are not perfect yet.…
(28 Sep 2023) In this blog post, Aaron Tay shares a non-comprehensive list of academic search engines that use generative AI (almost always Large language models) to generate direct answers on top of list of relevant results, typically using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Techniques. Find out more here.
(31 Aug 2023) Hallucinations, or the generation of inaccurate or fabricated information, are a significant concern surrounding the use of AI. In this post, Jennifer Gu, HKUST librarian, introduces five AI research tools that can generate answers based on real sources. These tools are designed to ensure that students and researchers can rely on accurate…
(17 Mar 2023) The public release of ChatGPT-3 in November last year captured the public’s imagination and turned this technology into front page news overnight. Only this week we saw the release of its much more powerful sibling, ChatGPT-4. In just a few short weeks there have already been some frankly startling demonstrations of the…
(28 Nov 2022) In this blog post, Aaron Tay reviews a few Q&A academic systems including Elicit.org, Scispace, Consensus.app, Scite.ai and Galactica, and provides a piece of background information on large language models that drives the explosion of AI tools. The blog post is here.
(27 Nov 2022) In the past decade, various online tools and Open Source software that can be useful in Southeast Asian librarianship have been developed. This article looks at a selection of online tools that are available to help in areas like cataloging and creation of Romanised versions of Southeast Asian scripts, text recognition, text…
(22 Aug 2022) In Aaron Tay‘s blog post, he shares: “My blog usually takes the view that most of our users do not start at the library homepage as a truism and since the beginning of the blog in 2009, I have covered tools that help users “get back” to library resources or at…
(14 Mar 2022) Thanks to evolving AI technology, the showcase of citation is no longer simply a solid number. Aaron Tay, a librarian and long-time observer of research tools recap the citation context features in Semantic Scholars, scite, Web of Science, and Scholarcy. “The definitions for citation sentence or citation context vary slightly but…
(31 January 2022) Today’s newsletter discusses how LibKey has been enhanced with Retraction Watch data to help prevent retracted articles from being cited. The Third Iron Newsletter has the full story here.