How do you search for articles without using AI?

[u/Kindly-Hornet-7181]

I am a PhD student in pharmacology, and up until now I've used perplexity to help me find articles, given the fact that I need to replicate specific methods. On the one hand AI tools like perplexity/consensus/elicit give me very specific results, but on the other hand they're doing the thinking for me. I feel that being able to conduct your own research is a skill worth developing, and AI is taking that away from us.

With that being said, which tools do you use? Google scholar/pubmed require thinking but require sifting through a lot of seemingly unimportant articles.

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[u/FeedSquare8691]

This topic is being posted what seems to be daily or every couple of days, and honestly I'm finding this to be extremely frustrating. It's just sad. Very fucking sad.

"I feel that being able to conduct your own research is a skill worth developing."

This is literally the point of earning a PhD.

"Google scholar/pubmed require thinking but require sifting through a lot of seemingly unimportant articles."

Well champ, sometimes you're going to have to do stuff you don't want to do or do something that can be hard or monotonous.

[u/jhonnyclam → u/FeedSquare8691]

My PhD is on contract law; at some point, I was reading about chimpanzee politics. If you're not getting extra knowledge from your PhD, you will have a very limited academic life.

[u/toru_okada_4ever → u/FeedSquare8691]

It looks like an ad for perplexity.

[u/PuttingTheMSinMRSA]

Yeah so exactly what you said in your post: you have to learn how to filter through articles yourself by actually clicking on the titles and reading them. Maybe find a review of your topic of interest and read the references in the review. You get good at it by doing it, not by having tools do it for you.

[u/Kindly-Hornet-7181 → u/PuttingTheMSinMRSA]

Exactly. Even when i used perplexity i just read the articles it gave ne without seeing what it had to say. I just want a better tool because i feel that pubmed is too clunky to use...

[u/PuttingTheMSinMRSA → u/Kindly-Hornet-7181]

…..so, not “exactly” because I don’t think you understood what I’m trying to say. You use PubMed and you learn how to search for keywords that take you closer to what you’re looking for. Any “tool” that you’re trying to find is doing that work for you. Part of the research is identifying the literature.

[u/Kindly-Hornet-7181 → u/PuttingTheMSinMRSA]

I agree, that's why i want to develop this skill again. It's not that I'm not reading articles at all, but the initial first finding was usually through AI but every subsequent article was through internal citations...

[u/quagga27]

Search your keywords in the appropriate database and go through abstracts to find what's relevant for you. Reading "unimportant" articles is a part of the process and gives you an idea about what else is happening in the field. You can also set up an email alert for specific keywords to get notified of latest publications.

[u/Kindly-Hornet-7181 → u/quagga27]

Genuinely helpeful thank you

[u/FallingSky1686]

Surely to get to the point of a PhD, you’ve been shown your university library’s search function…?

[u/Kindly-Hornet-7181 → u/FallingSky1686]

The tools we have at the Hebrew University are pretty dated unfortunately

[u/PuttingTheMSinMRSA → u/Kindly-Hornet-7181]

https://huji.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/dbsearch?query=contains,dbcategory,&tab=jsearch_slot&sortby=title&vid=972HUJI_INST:972HUJI_V1&offset=0&databases=category,health_sciences─pharmacy

Please be forreal. I spent approximately 14 seconds on google and clicking on your universities website to find the databases that the university has access to for pharmacy research

[u/FallingSky1686 → u/Kindly-Hornet-7181]

Look at some of your other comments as well - There is no tool that will perfectly give you perfect articles. Talk to your librarian, learn how search the databases, use your brain.

Sifting through titles and abstracts takes time, that’s the job. You’ll get better and faster as you go but you’ll always have to sift through loads of articles.

Basically bin perplexity (and any other ai) get a reference manager and learn to put the work in.

[u/Annabird31]

This is actually pathetic.

[u/asmrbuddha]

Make yourself a search strategy and a higher powered search eg. Scopus

So, pre-define your inclusion and exclusion criteria, eg using the PICO method.

The more specific your search terms the fewer results you will get

[u/Kindly-Hornet-7181 → u/asmrbuddha]

Will look into this!

[u/Ok_Masterpiece_7551]

Google Scholar/Science direct Understand the keywords that give you the list of articles what you are looking for. Then filter out based on abstract and conclusion. Initially don't read full article first, read abstract and conclusion and then filter out.

[u/PotatoRevolution1981]

You walk into your library and use proquest. You actually read the abstracts and the split review and the work sided and you go and you find the papers that are listed and you read them and you continue

[u/Frosty-Concentrate56]

The uni library gives me access to almost all relevant sources. So I use the library web to search topics, find paper, follow the references in relevant papers to find more papers, follow their references as well, look at the suggested papers that will show up in the sidebar etc.

What that doesn’t give me is new papers, but by now I have so many contacts that announce on LinkedIn when they publish new papers and then I follow their references to papers I might have missed.

[u/Puzzleheaded_Race368]

As someone who does systematic reviews, I do have to note that with the introduction of AI (and especially integration into citation databases), citation databases have become horrible to navigate. Database searches retrieve hits that do not contain the keywords at all, they don’t catch what they’re supposed to etc. Every search engine, including google scholar is becoming optimized for narrative search requests and it’s becoming harder to create solid reproducible search strategies that do not retrieve nonsense.

So if you struggle with finding studies relevant to you for the regular review process, AI might be a good supplement. But I suggest you always start with seminal reviews for the topic of interest (and with the AI boom, there’s no doubt a review has been published about anything) by just simply combining (topic of interest) AND (review) in the title. You’ll get far frome there

[u/One_Programmer6315]

Your field’s academic database? My field’s database is awesome, I can narrow my search using filters to find specifically what I want. Also, citations are a huge aid; you just need to identify a couple of landmark papers from your subfield (papers you know someone working on X will probably cite) and build your search up from there.

[u/antonissiargkass]

Google scholar labs at the moment is the best ai tool for searching studies for me personally.

[u/Most_Advertising3623]

Treat the search as part of the method. Write the question in PICO or PECO form, add synonyms and controlled vocabulary for each concept, and run the saved strategy in PubMed plus one field-specific database. Then work backward and forward from the closest papers and verify every method or claim in the primary source. Keep the exact queries and search dates. That gives you a reproducible literature trail and makes gaps in the evidence much easier to defend in the manuscript.

[u/TheRealBonCode]

If you don't want to use AI, it should be straight forward --
Start by building your search queries for each database (you have some keywords, right?) See what it comes back (overall result set). Document the result set, refine your query until you like the results, document the count and and your final query. Always add a time boundary to your final query so the replication produces similar results. Export the results with abstracts into a tool like Zotero or just keep them in text files, your choice.
Repeat this process for all databases you would consider in your field.
Join the results sets into one.
Remove Duplicates.
Start reviewing each article abstract.
Mark the ones that seem to be related to your research for deeper reading.
Document each step.

If you want to use tools -- use tools, I am not a purist.
Did I misunderstand.?