New AI Research Assistant Makes Finding Sources Simple

For many people, the first step of writing a research paper looks more or less the same. You type your topic into the library search box and brace yourself for thousands of results. It can be daunting to parse through so many materials and determine what actually aligns with your topic.

Now, FSU faculty, staff, and students have access to the AI Research Assistant, a built-in tool designed to provide easy, efficient access to the research materials they need.

The AI Research Assistant is part of Primo, the discovery platform FSU Libraries uses, and is maintained by the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC), a statewide agency housed at FSU that provides the shared library catalog for 1.3 million students, faculty and staff across 12 state universities and 28 state colleges.

Rather than requiring a carefully built keyword or Boolean search, this tool enables users to write plain-language questions about their research topics. From there, the AI Research Assistant returns a short, ranked list of sources.
“It's a way to make it simpler to find the information resources you're looking for in this enormous library catalog," said Elijah Scott, FLVC's executive director of library services.

The catalog now offers two AI-powered search options. Ask Anything converts a natural-language question into a Boolean search of materials FSU already owns. The AI Research Assistant goes further: it uses a large language model to search the Central Discovery Index, a vendor-managed index of tens of millions of scholarly records.

From there, it presents the user with the five sources it finds most relevant. It also suggests related questions for further exploration. The tool works only from established metadata such as titles, authors, subject headings and abstracts, not full article text, so it can point to sources but can't summarize an individual article's full content for a user. It's up to the researcher to read the sources and decide whether to include them in their work. Users can also provide direct feedback on results through a thumbs-up or thumbs-down option. 
Because the assistant draws from that larger index, it may point to sources FSU doesn't directly own, meaning students will need to request those texts through interlibrary loan. And unlike the AI chatbots many researchers rely on for sources, every source the AI Research Assistant returns is real and citable.

Along with the benefit of verifiable sources, Scott notes, “Part of the intent of the tool is to solve the problem of the user -- student, faculty, staff whomever — being overwhelmed by too many search results.”

Statewide, 20 of FLVC's 40 partner institutions (9 universities and 11 colleges) have already enabled the AI Research Assistant. Thanks to this new tool, the FSU community can enjoy a more efficient entry into the research process. With streamlined results, FSU faculty, staff and students can spend less time searching and more time engaging with the materials that matter most.

Students, faculty and staff can try the AI Research Assistant now through the FSU Libraries website.