Oxford has introduced the AI Discovery Assistant, which offers an new way of searching the Oxford Academic platform for book and journal content. The tool is currently available on-campus only, meaning users on hard-wired Temple computers or on a personal device while inside the Charles Library building. The Discovery Assistant uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system in combination with the publicly available metadata from Oxford, including title, abstract, keyword, contributor, and publication date. It does not use book or journal full text, nor does it search beyond the Oxford Academic platform. You can access the AI Discovery Assistant using the button to the right of the search bar.
Once you enter search terms, the AI Discovery Assistant will return 10 results ranked by relevance, and, if the result has an abstract, it will provide a 2-sentence AI-generated summary. You may click through and view full text of the resources that are available to Temple University on the Oxford platform. Please note that the tool searches all Oxford Academic resources, not just the ones that Temple can access, so some results may not be immediately available to you. You can look for those unavailable Oxford results elsewhere in Library Search or request InterLibrary Loan, as needed.
In general, it seems to provide better results from using a few carefully chosen keywords rather than a longer query. Oxford suggests that you can add the terms book, chapter article, and journal to limit your results, and you may also try inputting ISBN, DOI, or publication date.
Search history is not retained from session to session, and the assistant will 'time out' and end your session if you do not continue to interact with the page. If you wish to save your results, please copy-paste them into another document. No data from the Discovery Assistant is used to train LLMs.
