Unpopular opinion: I miss the old way of finding research papers

Six months ago, I was still digging through university library databases for hours. You know the drill, typing in keywords, getting 10,000 results, and reading abstracts one by one. It felt like a treasure hunt, but a slow one. Then I started using Elicit. Now I just ask a plain English question and it pulls up the most relevant papers with summaries. It cut my literature review time for a project in Chicago from two days to about four hours. The AI doesn't just find them, it explains why they matter to my specific query. Part of me feels like I'm missing the random discoveries you get from manual searches, though. Has anyone else found a good middle ground, or do you just embrace the speed?

2 comments

2 Comments

burns.brooke1d ago

What's the real goal here, finding papers or feeling like a scholar? I get what @olivia_barnes97 means about the old way feeling like real work, but that's just busywork. The new tools do the boring part so your brain can do the actual thinking part. I'd rather save the time and use it to actually read the good papers I find. The random finds were fun, but mostly they just led me down useless rabbit holes anyway.

olivia_barnes971d ago

Used to think those old database hunts built character or something. Felt like real work. Then I got buried in a meta-analysis and tried one of the new tools out of pure desperation. The speed is just too good to ignore. I still do a quick manual search sometimes just to scratch that itch for random finds, but I can't go back to doing it all that way.