Consensus GPT

July 22, 2024

Consensus GPT

"Do you know Consensus? I use it for my literature searches. It is really great!", one of the first-year history students assured me during a library workshop. I always love search tips and could not wait to dive into this new scholarly 'promised land'. Since its launch in January, Consensus has been the most used product with a Chat GPT plugin, a chatbot driven by artificial intelligence. This latest app promises access to a database with 200 million existing academic papers. All you have to do is ask a question. It sounds simple. So I took it to the test.

GO TO THE CONSENSUS GPT

Consensus in short

Content

200 million academic (mostly open access) source material from Semantic Scholar. Most articles are derived from hard sciences, followed by medical and social sciences. Humanities content is minimal. See the topic overview on: Focus on the right subject matter Via the Chat GPT plugin the information can be searched.

Search

Search for publications by asking a research question or formulating a sentence (preferably in English for the most relevant results).
Search with the Co-pilot for other kinds of questions. For instance: formulating examples of research questions, top ten publications on topics etc.
Boolean searches (AND, OR, NOT etc) are not possible. This makes narrow searches on specific keywords not possible.

Result

Synthese option: summary of what the found literature says concerning the search question.
Co-pilot option: analyzes the result and provides the key insights and conclusions within the found literature based on the search question.
Filter options: publication year, open access, citations, research method (meta-analysis, systematic research etc), journals, domains and country of origin of the research.

Download

Share link option to X, other social media or e-mail.
Export references to Zotero, Refworks, Mendeley.
Chicago is included in the citation options.
Save on Consensus.

Example

Search

Results

Green: bookmark, citing and downloading options for each publication

Concluding remarks on Consensus

1. Finding literature

The quality of the available content within a database is key for every academic. Every historical research topic has vital authors, books, and articles that should be included in the bibliography. This is the biggest issue for historians with Consensus. Because of its focus on hard sciences, it is difficult for a historian to find vital references.
The longer a question in Consensus is, the more versatile the results will be.
Filter options such as systematic review are interesting for medical and social sciences, but will hardly provide a result within historical publications.

2. Research question

Via the Co-pilot option, Consensus can give examples of research questions. This can be an interesting way to narrow down or brainstorm on a topic. However ... again... the result of questions in Consensus will be focussed on the content within the Semantic Scholar database: hard, medical and social sciences. Because of the partnership with Wolters Kluwer juridical suggestions are included as well.

3. Language

The overall majority of the content is written in English. A search in a different language can provide limited results with academic publications. This bias is, however, also common in most bibliographical databases.

4. Overall

Using the co-pilot and/or synthesize is freely available via credits. If these credits are used up, you must subscribe to Consensus.
Finding historical literature on a topic should include more than one resource. Google Scholar and Archive Scholar are interesting alternative search engines. Databases, like Web of Science and Historical Abstracts, offer more historical content than Consensus. For historical books and chapters within edited books go to CataloguePlus, Worldcat and Internet Archive.

Although Consensus offers interesting publications, consulting other resources is still needed when searching for relevant academic literature in historical research.

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