AI Features in Major Databases & Platforms

ProQuest has introduced a generative AI-powered Research Assistant tool in many of its academic research and dissertation databases. Of those, Temple currently offers:

ProQuest One Academic            
    ProQuest Central             
    ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global
    ProQuest One Black Studies  
    ProQuest One Literature 

The Research Assistant can help you revise your search query, provide a quick overview of a full-text article or dissertation, and brainstorm related research questions.

Searching

After you run a search that returns a large number of results, the Research Assistant will suggest related terms listed in a row below the search bar. Click the plus sign to add these terms to your search and narrow your results. These terms are generated by an LLM based on your initial query. 

Reviewing Content & Brainstorming Related Topics

When you are viewing a full-text article or dissertation in one of these databases, the Research Assistant displays in a sidebar on the right side of the screen, and you may choose from prompts to display Key Takeaways, Important Concepts, Essential Details, Findings & Conclusions, and Related Research Topics. Key Takeaways will be influenced by your initial search to make them more relevant to your query, and a 'Relationship to your search terms' section may be included that section.

Please note that all of these options may not be available for all full-text content, such as newspaper articles. Some options, such as Essential Details and Findings & Conclusions, cite the portions of the document used by the Research Assistant to generate these fields. The Key Takeaways, Important Concepts, and Related Research Topics are all extracted from the full text of the document using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques; no data from other documents or from public LLMs is used to generate them. The tool also has safeguards in place to try to prevent the generation of offensive or inappropriate content, so if a document contains some sensitive terms, it is possible that the Research Assistant will not return responses for that document. ProQuest is not using user inputs nor the full-text documents to train LLMs, and ProQuest is only using generative AI within a secure environment.