Do not cite a source that you haven’t read yourself.  Many generative AI tools are prone to hallucinations, and will create citations that look authentic, but do not actually exist.  We recommend using library databases or Easy Search to begin your research.

Some tools do provide access to real sources, although the amount and type of journals and academic sources used will be limited compared to the research databases the Library provides.  Examples of other tools include Perplexity, which searches sources available on the internet such as news sites and government information, and Elicit, which searches over sources from the Semantic Scholar database.  

Finally, the AI research assistant tools within individual Library databases will connect you to related articles contained in each databases, as well as suggest other ways to deepen your search, such as searching for related scholars.

Examples

1. When looking at individual citations in the JSTOR interactive research assistant, you can ask the tool to “show related content” to get a list of additional citations within JSTOR.  

2. You can prompt tools like Perplexity and Scite to “Provide citations to 5 peer reviewed articles on the dangers of smoking.”  Note that Perplexity will return both citations websites like cancer.gov, which are not peer reviewed articles, and citations to articles from the PubMed government database of health and medical information.