About OneSearch

OneSearch has an AI tool called Research Assistant (RA).

RA isn't the same type of AI as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot. RA can't help you create a recipe or write a thank-you note.

RA does a few specific tasks to help you with your research.

Ask RA your research question and it will:​

• Find five articles and/or ebooks in the library databases related to your research question​
• Summarize the five articles into a brief Overview, giving you an overall introduction to your research topic​
• Suggest other library sources beyond the five summarized ones​
• Suggest alternative research questions related to your original one

To start using RA, from the library homepage, look for the RA link near the OneSearch box:

If you are already in OneSearch, you can access RA by the link near the top of the screen:

Research Assistant (RA) works best when you give it a prompt that sounds like a research question.

These are examples of prompts or questions that would work well in RA:

• What role do nurses play in preventing patient falls?
• Is cognitive behavioral therapy an effective treatment for anxiety?
• How can a human resources department help improve employee retention?

And your question doesn't even have to sound like you're already an expert on your topic! The following types of questions work well in RA, too:

• Is green tea good for you?
• Are women paid the same as men?
• How can college students avoid distractions while studying?

Use the menu just to the left of the box where you type in your research question. By clicking on the menu, you'll get options to focus your search by type of source (for example, you can limit to peer-reviewed articles only), as well as the option to limit by publication date:

RA will answer your research question with these resources and tools:

1. Top five most relevant articles for your research question--these are the articles RA uses to write its Overview. RA also gives a link to articles related to your topic, beyond the top five:

2. An Overview of your research topic, written by RA and based on summaries of the top five articles it found:

3. Research questions related to your original question. These can show you different aspects of your research question to explore, aspects you might not have thought of before:

Unfortunately, RA does have a tendency to sometimes cite and summarize articles and ebooks that the library does not have full-text access to in our databases.

RA is not hallucinating articles that don't exist! It's using solid information on real articles to cite and summarize them for you!

But RA doesn't know that it's recommending an article that our library does not have in full-text. And in your research and writing process, reviewing the full text of an article yourself is necessary for you to use and cite the article in your paper. 

The library apologizes! We've contacted the database company who produces RA and made them aware of the issue.

Here's What to Do if RA Recommends Many Articles or Ebooks That Aren't Available in Full-Text Right Away:

• Ignore that article or ebook and use another relevant source that is full text in the library.
• If RA summarized the article in its Overview, you certainly should read the summary, as it will contribute to your general knowledge of the topic.
• But for almost any effective research question--where your topic has been written about by scholars and other researchers--you'll be able to find other articles in the library that are relevant to your topic and that you can review in full yourself, so that you can use and cite the articles in your paper. 
• An easy way to find full-text articles on your topic is to click the "View More Results" button on the right of the RA results screen:

• When you click "View More Results," RA will convert your natural-language research question into a long Boolean keyword search. RA then automatically enters that search into our regular OneSearch database, and you'll be taken into OneSearch to see the search results.
• Now that you're in the regular OneSearch environment, and not RA, you'll see that OneSearch finds articles that are almost always full-text, as opposed to the top five article recommendations in RA.

Research Assistant is just that, an assistant who helps you get started on your library research.

Research Assistant can never do a whole project for you, and of course you would never just copy an RA Overview and submit it as your own work!

Research Assistant helps you by finding five library articles related to your topic, then summarizing those articles into a general overview of your topic.

Your job is to take what you learned from the Overview and explore your topic further:

• Review the five articles that RA found: check how accurately RA summarized each article in the overview, and mine the articles for further ideas or facts that you can use in your project.

• Click the "View More Results" link in RA to discover other articles besides the five that RA used for the Overview.

• Explore other aspects of your topic by examining RA's Related Research Questions. You don't have to change your topic! But the related questions may help you explore useful facets of your topic that you can incorporate into your project.