Harnessing GenAI in Your Academic Journey

To get an overview of the key features of Perplexity, check out Getting Started, learning different Search Modes and A student's guide to using Perplexity Spaces, which explain how you can apply it for learning. Prompting tips and examples are also available for your to understand how to craft a prompt that works well for Perplexity.

While Perplexity is an user-friendly tool for quick information retrieval and initial topic exploration, it is more general-purpose and has limitations like other GenAI tools. Evaluate the content generated by Perplexity, master basic research skills and use it in conjunction other sources.

📌 Tip: Perplexity may draw on academic sources to compile its responses. To read the full-text of these sources, install library browser plug-ins to access them directly from publishers, bypassing the library webpage.

The default mode is Deep Search, which compiles responses from real-time sources. To utilize more sources for a more detailed and complex response, Deeper Search can be selected, although it takes more time to respond. A chain-of-thought approach is also available using pre-existing knowledge, without fetching new data, for analytical tasks via the Think option. 

📌 Tip: While both Perplexity and Grok leverage live information, Grok is less structured, more reliant on X sources, and less citation focused, making it better suited for brainstorming and broad-perspective insights than rigorous academic research.

Semantic Scholar offers search functions similar to search engines and academic databases, but with enhanced AI capabilities, including:

• AI Enhanced Search: Techniques that utilizes machine learning to extract meaning and identify connections from within papers, which helps navigates sources more efficiently than traditional keyword-based search engines.
• Citation Insights: Feature that facilitates the in-depth understanding of the citations of a work, such as recency, classification of which part the others are citing and citing authors.
• TLDRs (Too Long; Didn't Read):  Short summaries of the objective and results to help researchers to skim through search results.
• Semantic Reader: An AI-powered augmented reading application, which helps researchers comprehend papers faster, available for most arXiv papers.

📌 Tip: Semantic Scholar may provide a publisher's link to the academic paper in the search results. To read the full-text of these sources, install library browser plug-ins to access them directly from publisher's webpage, bypassing the library webpage.