One of the most important parts of any search for information–whether academic or for personal reasons–has always been to think critically about the information you find; to be skeptical, to not assume the information must be true and/or objective just because it happens to come from a particular source or person. No one is entirely objective. And we/human beings are easily misled. Our entire digital…
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The easy answer is that it is much faster and requires less effort to click a button and get a custom summary of academic papers and their connections–rather than spending the time and mental effort to do it yourself. Or, is this preference just an extension of the utility of abstracts that have been used to summarize academic papers for decades–long before the public rise…
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Frederik Joelving, Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Guillaume Cabanac, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (from The Conservation) Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives. It is exceedingly difficult…
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Thousands of academic books covering areas of the sciences are available (legally) to be used at no cost. Many can be downloaded and saved and then printed, if desired. Others can be read online but not saved/downloaded. More books are becoming freely available every month. While use is free, there is a cost to creating or modifying and publishing these books. That cost is often…
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a ubiquitous topic. Looking at social media and technology news gives the impression that the world abounds in AI experts and superusers. But that is misleading. For most of us, including those of us at the libraries of higher ed institutions facing financial and enrollment challenges, AI can seem an especially daunting topic. We should pay attention. After all, will AI…
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There is an ever-growing array of artificial intelligence-based tools available for research use by students and faculty. These tools often use AI to create and find connections and themes between academic papers pulled from very large databases. The tools then use the power of visualizations to illustrate the connections and the power of summary to concisely describe the information, much the same way as abstracts…
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