Using AI tools for literature searches: how great is this idea?
Date
2025-06-25
DOI
Version
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
For this presentation at the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) Forum, medical librarians from multiple institutions collaboratively reviewed six generative AI tools, representing a mixture of general use chatbots and more specialized tools. Using uniform prompts on all platforms, we requested peer-reviewed literature on two health topics. We were interested in the number and percentage of real vs. hallucinated citations for each tool, whether articles (if real) were relevant to the prompt, and how results compared with those from a database search for the same topic. We also considered how often each tool repeated citations to a particular user and how often multiple users received the same citations in their results.
Description
Presentation at 2025 BLC Forum.