Chat GPT has made available via its free version (3.5) access to a custom GPT called Consensus that I am finding useful for locating scholarly articles that can give me a quick sense of scholarly approaches to pinpoint. Unfortunately, Consensus isn't linked yet to HeinOnLine/Westlaw/Lexis, so isn't quite at its full potential for legal scholarship, but it still can get a researcher pointed in the right direction, especially for interdisciplinary questions.
How to access Consensus? Within Chat GPT, choose "Explore GPTs" from the left-hand menu. Then, choose the "Research and Analysis" category under the search bar. Then navigate to the Consensus app, which is circled in red below (it looks like a "C" made out of two blue-ish colors):
What is Consensus? It's a search engine, like the ones most researchers are familiar with (the company's description is here; I have no relationship with Consensus except as a user). What makes it more helpful than, say, a search in Google Scholar is that Consensus combines the power of a large language model and the 200 million+ research papers in the Semantic Scholar database. Semantic Scholar includes materials from Cambridge University Press, U Chicago Press, and several databases that are mostly science-oriented. It also claims links with SSRN, but so far, I have found that Consensus is not super-reliable yet for scouring legal scholarship that I know for sure is posted on SSRN. Hopefully that will be fixed soon.
To test out Consensus, I asked a question to which I already knew the answer. Because I've written about the topic, I could better evaluate the quality of the search results. Details after the fold.
I asked Consensus, "How is the family defined for tax purposes?" Here's what I got back:
Consensus hyperlinks to the articles it cites and gives a brief summary. If you click through to any one of the articles/books/chapters, you get the piece's "Key Takeaway," an abstract, a linked list of other work citing this one, and a link to the full text.
Again, for legal scholars, until this database includes more law review articles, it won't be the research powerhouse that it can be. In the meantime, it's a decent research tool and helps identify non-law review scholarship fairly quickly. And it's free!
Interesting. Free but it not doing a great job with me. (Pre-Civil War literary addresses from North.)
Posted by: Al | May 31, 2024 at 10:54 AM