The Research Assistant is automatically enabled on eligible books and can be found on the left side of the screen for PDFs, or on the right side of the screen for EPUBs which is our example here.
- The Ebook Central Research Assistant is only available for books included in your library’s Ebook Central subscription or those purchased by your institution. If the Research Assistant isn’t available, it may be because your library hasn’t enabled the tool. Alternatively, it’s possible that the book isn’t part of your library’s collection or the publisher has chosen to opt out.
- You’ll first see an overview of the book, which is not AI Generated. This overview is the same description you’d see on the book details page.
- When moving thrugh the book, you will see the chapter names on the Research Assistant pane.
- To generate the Key Takeaway for the selected chapter, click on “show Key Takeaway from this chapter”
Key takeaways are generated from each chapter within the book and are intended to help a user understand what the chapter is about in a succinct, easy-to-understand way to help quickly determine its relevance for the user’s specific research. The Ebook Central Research Assistant runs on Ebook Central content only. The information provided is based on the actual book chapter. This is not a summary of the chapter but pulls out key themes (key takeaways) and why these topics are significant.
To generate the Concepts for the selected chapter, click on “Show concepts discussed in this chapter” to generate a response for each chapter.
Concepts and their explanations are identified within the book chapter. This is a list of the top five concepts that are relevant in the context of the chapter. The identified Concepts (names, places, topics, etc.) include an explanation of the term, relevant to the chapter.
- The definition for each term is not derived from external sources but is generated using the text of the chapter with the goal of explaining the concept in the context of the chapter.
- Each concept is hyperlinked so that users can run a search on any individual term by clicking on it.
- All generated Key Takeaways and Concepts for a book will be available within the Research Assistant panel for as long as the book is kept open.
