Collaboration Coffee

Community members
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Have you ever … used AI tools to search for literature?

Collaboration Coffee
In session Collaboration Coffees No. 2 , Sept. 4, 2025, 13:00 – 14:00
Exact timing: 13:00 – 14:00
Room info: Library Meetingroom , Big Meetingroom

Lauer, Franziska1ORCID iD icon
  1. Bundesanstalt für Wasserbau - Hamburg

Modern AI tools for academic literature research can be divided into finders and connectors .

Finders operate in a quite similar way like catalogues: you enter a keyword, a phrase or – even better – a complete question and receive responding matches. Finders work particularly well in the natural sciences, where semantic analyses are less dependent on monographs or older literature sources then in humanities or social sciences. This is due to the fact that finders primarily index and analyse English journal articles with given DOIs and open access status. Connectors , on the other hand, start with a pre-existing literature source, designated as a seed . You enter part of the seed’s metadata (ideally a DOI) into the AI tool to identify further publications. This process automatically identifies literature, which is cited, thematically related or methodologically relevant.

In this Collaboration Coffee session, I will demonstrate how to use both options effectively: The start into a specific research question can be aided by a finder such as Semantic Scholar or Elicit. Based on a selected publication, connector such as ResearchRabbit or Inciteful then help to tap into further literature sources. Alongside my specific examples, I would like to use an interactive tool in this Collaboration Coffee session to hear about your experiences. Let's discuss whether and how these AI tools can speed up our workflow and enhance the scientific depth. Are we able to achieve deep research with such AI tools?