Generative AI Features in Major Databases & Platforms
Oxford Academic: AI Discovery Assistant
On the Oxford Academic platform, Oxford has introduced a new Beta tool, the AI Discovery Assistant, which offers an new way of searching the Oxford Academic platform for book and journal content. The tool currently is not available from the Oxford Academic homepage, but once you click into a Subject, Journals, Books, or any piece of Oxford content, you will see it as an option to the right of the search box in the upper right corner of the page:
After you enter your search terms, the tool return 10 results ranked by relevance, and, if the result has an abstract, it will provide a 2-sentence AI-generated summary. You may click through and view full text of the resources available to Rutgers on the Oxford platform. The tool searches all Oxford Academic resources, not just the ones that Rutgers can access, so some results may not be available to you (you could search for those in QuickSearch to see if full text is available on another platform and, if not, request them through Interlibrary Loan). The Assistant allows followup queries as well. Here is an example of the Discovery Assistant in action:
The Discovery Assistant uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system in combination with the publicly available metadata from Oxford, including title, abstract, keyword, contributor, and publication date. It does not use book or journal full text, nor does it search beyond the Oxford Academic platform. In general, it seems to provide better results from a short, precise input (a few carefully chosen keywords) rather than a longer query. Oxford suggests that you can add the terms book, chapter article, and journal to limit your results, and you may also try inputting ISBN, DOI, or publication date.
Search history is not retained from session to session, and the assistant will "time out" and end your session if you do not continue to interact with the page, so if you wish to save your results, please copy-paste them into another document. No data from the Discovery Assistant is used to train LLMs. Please see Oxford's AI Discovery Assistant documentation for more details.