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PolyU Library

Harnessing GenAI in Your Academic Journey


Beyond those offered by PolyU, numerous AI-integrated tools are available to assist in various research tasks. Explore some popular tools with free plans below.


Semantic Scholar

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.

Perplexity

To get an overview of the key features of Perplexity, check out Getting started with Perplexity and A student's guide to using Perplexity Spaces, which explain how you can apply it for learning. 

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.

For Reading and Compreheading

For Organizing and Writing

For Presenting