If you are a congenitally curious person like me, you have probably asked yourself questions like: “What was it like on board a Japanese passenger ship in the Taishō era?” Or “Mortuary cannibalism in Amazonia — that was a thing, right?” Or “Is the concept of ‘warlord’ actually a category which has proven useful in social science?” Like me, you know the answer is out there: There are people who have studied this. They have written books and articles. You just need one or two citations to find them. Then you could latch onto the whole scholarly network. But where to get started? Google often doesn’t work because other scholars often describe their topic slightly differently from the way you’ve been thinking about it. Or it doesn’t work because the term you’re searching for is too general to produce a useful result. Or the stuff you want is too specialized to be picked up by Google in any useful way.
Anyone who has asked an AI these questions knows how much of a fail it is at answering them. It just makes up fake citations which are eerily similar to real citations. However, there is ‘one weird trick’ to use these fake citations to find real ones. It’s not that complicated:
- Ask the Google AI for citations on a topic
- Put a few titles or authors from the fake AI citations into Google Search and add the word “JSTOR”
- Google Search will be all like: “Those don’t exist, but are eerily similar to some actual citations” and then it will give you the actual citations.
A few caveats:
This is not a way to do research on a topic you already know about. Google AI + Google Search is not better than an expert knower like yourself. This is also not a good way to learn about a completely new topic. It works best as a way to connect you with literatures just beyond your horizon. As an anthropologist I wouldn’t use it to learn about biology, but I would use it for cultural history or historical sociology. And, to be sure, the results it gives you are not the best results. So this is hardly a panacea or amazing discovery. It is just a way to get you the very first citations you need to latch on to a literature and start doing the work of tracking down major authors and works. You need to supply the intuition and expertise to work with the results — Google just points you in the right direction.
I’m sure AI + Search is not an amazing insight and that other people have discovered it before. But I did find it useful so I thought I’d share — maybe you’ll find it useful too.
Alex Golub 