LibGuides: Generative AI at the River Campus Libraries: Researching With GenAI

Brainstorming

Use the AI tool as a thinking partner: have it ask you questions!

Example, “I'm writing an academic paper on therapy dogs in colleges. I'm curious about how they help with mental health. Ask me questions to help me narrow my topic."

While you can ask for summary of themes on a topic, synonyms or keywords to use in an academic search, or methods used in research to get results, an AI tool as a brainstorming partner can help you find a unique and interesting topic. Remember to ask follow up questions - as a brainstorming partner, AI tools work best with multiple back and forth questions and answers. Think about giving your questions some parameters or guidance - think of “who, what, where, when, why, and how” questions.

Example, a follow up question might be: “I'm interested in long term effects of therapy dog interactions. I'm especially interested in how to find out if they help certain college students more than others. Ask me questions that would help me decide which populations to study.

Ideamap is a tool designed for visual brainstorming - instead of a chatbot, it will provide a concept map/mind map of concepts and how they are related.

ChatGPT
Access ChatGPT by creating an account.
Claude
Talk to Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic.
IdeaMap
Ideamap is a visual brainstorming tool. It populates ideas in a concept-map - great for visual thinkers.
Microsoft CoPilot
Microsoft Bing's large language model GenAI, powered by ChatGPT-4 architecture. Can provide search functionality.
Free with your UR Microsoft account.
University of Rochester GenAI Chat
University of Rochester's GenAI tool. Not trained on UR material. HIPAA and FERPA compliant, highly secure.

Research

Connected Papers
A visual tool to help researchers find research on a topic or other papers cited by or closely connected to what you've already found. Search by topic, title of a paper you've already found, by DOI or by paper urls from archives like PubMed, Semantic Scholar, or arXiv.
Elicit
Elicit uses machine learning to help you with your research: find papers, extract key claims, summarize, brainstorm ideas, and more.
Perplexity
An AI tool that is useful for gaining insight about topics, especially for literature reviews and starting the research process.
Research Rabbit
AI enabled citation-based literature mapping tool. See videos and this review for more.
SciSpace
A suite of AI tools to help researchers discover, understand and write research papers.
Semantic Scholar
An AI tool to search and discover scientific research.

Image Generators

Image generators are useful for creating customized clipart, powerpoint backgrounds, and general low-effort images. There are considerably more powerful image generators available, but these are the best and easiest to use for the average user. If you are interested in further information on AI image generators, please contact the AI Literacy team.

CoPilot Image Creator
Microsoft Bing's text-to-image creator, powered by DALL·E3. Free with your university account. Microsoft does not grant users ownership rights to images.
Adobe Firefly
Adobe's text-to-image creator, trained on their own proprietary algorithm. Free with an Adobe account. Generated images are open for commercial use, but free accounts have a watermark.
Midjourney
A proprietary text-to-image creator that utilizes Stable Diffusion models. Requires a token-based monthly subscription and a Discord account. Images are open for commercial use if the business makes less than a certain amount.