Artificial intelligence tools are appearing constantly, but librarians are doing their part to keep up! Through January, 2026, all three UM campuses now have trial access to a promising research tool called Consensus. It synthesizes research findings from peer-reviewed sources, as well as providing other tools for getting the most important and trustworthy sources in your focus of study.
The Thompson Library already provides access to several discovery services**: QuickSearch, EBSCO Discovery Service, etc. Consensus has much of the coverage of a discovery service, with over 200 million peer-reviewed articles available for analysis, drawn from crawling scholarly literature, as well as using OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar. By using both traditional index-searching and semantic searching (i.e., using context to identify the most pertinent content), Consensus finds articles, narrows the results to those most likely to be high quality and reliable (based on citations of them, the journal rankings, and when they were published), and then runs a separate, more refined AI analysis of the top papers.
This AI analysis can then examine papers in greater depth, or draw findings from several. You can also upload a PDF of a scholarly paper for analysis, and the Ask This Paper feature lets you inquire about the contents, with citations to the relevant sections. (This works only with academic articles; I tried uploading a couple non-peer-reviewed articles, and Consensus wouldn't allow it!)
In addition to providing textual analysis, Consensus can create information tables, generate outlines, and show the preponderance, among selected papers, of different conclusions (i.e., Yes, Possibly, Mixed, or No).
One serious concern about artificial intelligence is its tendency to hallucinate, providing false information to users. According to the publisher, Consensus functions in a way that prevents two common types of AI hallucinations, viz., nonexistent sources and incorrect statements of fact. By checking and verifying a paper's relevance, misinterpretations are still possible but less likely.
Peer-reviewed journal articles are the gold standard of most high-level academic library research, but not necessarily the sum total of it. For other sources of information, such as books, data files, corporate reports, government documents, recordings, and dissertations, a good old-fashioned discovery service like QuickSearch can fill the bill.
Consensus is integrated with LibKey, a linking service that both Flint and Ann Arbor use. In the trial, at least, Consensus is linked to Ann Arbor's LibKey account. Using the LibKey link will work for Flint users the vast majority of the time, but may lead to occasional dead ends. We don't know yet whether we would be able to link to Flint's account in the event of a subscription. In the meantime, please feel free to contact a librarian if you need assistance in tracking down unavailable articles.
Try Consensus and let us know what you think! It's a three-campus trial, and the feedback of Flint faculty and students is important.
** What is a discovery service? It's a tool for searching for and retrieving information from a very broad array of resources, covering many different formats, in a library's online and physical collections. Instead of searching Database A, then Database B, then the library catalog, then Citation Index C, a discovery service provides a single point of access to all, or nearly all, of the library's holdings. More information.
University of Michigan-Flint
0 Comments.