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MASS Program - Library Literacy: Search Tools

This guide is for MASS students, to help them improve their information and library literacy in order to successfully pursue a taught master's course in social sciences

PowerSearch for Books & Articles

For articles  and books  tick both the Library Catalog box and the Articles+ box

   

Primo Research Assistant: What & How

Primo Research Assistant is a GenAI tool that searches across HKUST Library's PowerSearch .

Current functions:

  • Semantic search & Natural language queries
  • Brief answers to questions + references based on the abstracts of top 5 results
  • Links to a longer results list

Note:

  • You must be signed in to MyAccount to use it
  • It may return results that need interlibrary loan
  • Some library material NOT searched & includes:
    • APA
    • Elsevier
    • JSTOR
    • Taylor & Francis
    • Conde Nast publications

Details from vendor:

Research Help AI Tools

Scite - HKUST subscribes to Scite, which can help you find & evaluate articles. It has a sub-section, Scite Assistant, (in beta) that allows you to ask questions, which are answered with generated text and embedded references, with the references and links on the right.

Elicit - Helps do research reviews. Type in a research topic and on the left it will give you references and on the right, summaries of the abstract. Links to papers via DOI and via Semantic Scholar.  Built by a non-profit company, Ought, based in California and Delaware in the USA. No direct links to full-text.

Consensus -  Helps to do research reviews. Type in a research topic and it provides a list of one-sentence summaries of research articles. Links to papers via Semantic Scholar. Possible to click through Semantic Scholar to get to full-text of subscribed things if you are ON campus (e.g. I was able to access an Elsevier article on campus). Company appears to be a partner of Semantic Scholar.

ChatPDF - Summarizes pdfs for you - how, who owns it? Not clear.

Semantic Reader - An AI-powered augmented scientific reading application available in Semantic Scholar. Features include automatically highlighted overlays to key information on a paper and citation cards that show details of a cited paper in-line where you're reading. Note that the Reader is not available for all papers but it works on most arXiv papers.

Databases (2/3 of these feed into PowerSearch)

Databases are structured systems for storing and retrieving records.

If you know which database(s) you want to search, go directly to the Alphabetical List and then click on the one you want. Or, explore different categories to discover useful & interesting databases appropriate for your assignments.

     Action: Watch this video: Selecting Library databases (1 min 26 sec)

Content (Resource Types) Databases Names

Scholarly Articles  & books

Statistics & Data

More statistics & data on the Library Guide for Statistics

Our World in Data is also an easy source to start using.

Specialist Encyclopedias

You can search for particular titles of encyclopedias on PowerSearch.   An easy method would be "Title has": encyclopedia AND [your topic].

In the meantime, here are are titles that may help you get going

 

News & Magazines Articles
LibGuide content by HKUST Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, unless otherwise noted.