University library on AI

The AI Hub for staff provides all the information you need about AI and GenAI at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, including policy, basic training and current developments.
The library provides information about the possibilities and advantages, but also the disadvantages and points to consider when using (Gen)AI tools to find and use information.

Opportunities and advantages

The correct use of AI offers advantages for students, lecturers, staff and researchers.

  • It is easier and faster to identify trends and theories, find relevant literature and organise and review large amounts of information.
  • There are separate tools, but existing tools and, for example, database search interfaces are also gradually being equipped with (Gen)AI functionalities.

Limitations, risks and disadvantages

  • AI tools are not flawless or free from bias and can produce incorrect, incomplete or distorted results.
  • There is uncertainty about the intellectual property rights of the content. The risk of plagiarism is high with AI.
  • Unauthorised AI tools offer no guarantees for the protection of privacy and copyright. Therefore, do not upload any confidential or sensitive internal information, copyrighted material or unpublished articles.
  • Human insight remains crucial, especially when it comes to contextual understanding and ethical considerations.
  • Free tools have fewer features or perform significantly less well than the paid versions.
  • The use of GenAI has a major negative environmental impact.

Guidelines for use

If you use AI to generate fragments of your text, you must cite the AI tools. This is not necessary for proofreading or topic orientation. These guidelines explain how to cite AI tools correctly.

General GenAI tools

The most well-known general Generative AI (GenAI) tools are ChatGPT from OpenAI, Copilot from Microsoft, and Gemini from Google. They have a chat function and use very large language models.

Advantages
These tools can be used to provide suggestions or feedback; to analyse information, provide examples and structures, or generate texts, images, tables and programme code. In the context of literature research, they can also be used to obtain suggestions for suitable terms (synonyms and alternative terms in Dutch and English). These can then be used in searches in databases and search engines. The German DeepL offers better translation quality than ChatGPT, Google and Microsoft.

Limitations
Please note: GenAI tools are not search engines and are not a good alternative for finding reliable information. The answers are generated based on statistics. Because the results are not completely reliable, verification is necessary.

GenAI tools for research

There are many interesting GenAI research tools

Possibilities

  • The tools can draw on large amounts of scientific literature, which naturally ensures better quality and reliability than the data used by general GenAI tools.
  • Some of the best-known tools are explained in more detail below.

Limitations

  • For literature research, AI searches various data sources, but the scope and quality of the results are difficult to assess. Semantic Scholar, an index of over 200 million scientific articles, is often used. Despite this large number, the index is not exhaustive (e.g. grey literature, non-indexed sources, books and non-English publications).
    Therefore, these tools are unsuitable for extensive literature analyses such as systematic reviews.
  • As with searching for information via Google, you only have access to public information. You may be able to find interesting information, but you do not yet have access to it.
  • To find reliable information, you can use library resources such as databases and indexes such as Web of Science. You can also use public citation indexes such as Google Scholar, OpenAlex and Dimensions. The GenAI research tools can therefore be used as a supplement.

Scite.ai
Scite.ai assesses the reliability of scientific claims and focuses primarily on social and biomedical sciences. A list of publications shows which citations support, contradict or are neutral towards a particular claim. You can also create reports and visualisations to analyse citation patterns and identify influential publications.

Scite.ai is integrated with Lean Library and can be used with Google Scholar. It also uses open access sources such as OFS and PubMed.

Elicit
Elicit is specifically aimed at academic research and helps streamline research. A table displays a number of articles with summaries. You can easily add columns to the table, such as methodology and recommendations for future research. Elicit can also identify recurring themes and concepts in multiple papers.

Consensus
Provides answers with metadata and citations, ideal for quick insights but less suitable for systematic reviews due to AI variability (the same search query can yield different citations or summaries, unsuitable for systematic reviews).

Perplexity
Perplexity offers real-time internet access for questions, analyses, information processing, summaries, ideas and specific research questions.

More information

The university library collection also contains a wealth of information about (Gen)AI. Search the catalogue using the keyword: kunstmatige intellegentie.

The Springer Nature Link (e-books and articles) and O'Reilly (e-books, videos and courses) databases contain in-depth information in English. For example, search for: Generative AI or ChatGPT.