{"id":4159,"date":"2025-10-30T01:00:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T01:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/library\/?p=4159"},"modified":"2026-04-06T21:33:53","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T21:33:53","slug":"power-up-your-academic-searches-with-consensus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.atu.edu\/library\/2025\/10\/30\/power-up-your-academic-searches-with-consensus\/","title":{"rendered":"Power Up Your Academic Searches With Consensus"},"content":{"rendered":"

From now until August 31, 2026, the Ross Pendergraft Library is offering a free trial of the AI-powered academic search engine, Consensus<\/a><\/strong>, to all Arkansas Tech University students, faculty, and staff. <\/span><\/p>\n

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What Is Consensus?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Consensus is a search engine for academic content that uses artificial intelligence to provide summaries of a given result set that may provide insight, answers, or a \u2018consensus\u2019 of highly-cited academic research on a given topic.\u00a0 It claims to make academic searching easier and less time-consuming for busy researchers.<\/p>\n

How Do I Create An Account?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Tech users can create an account with Consensus<\/a><\/strong> using their atu.edu email.\u00a0 This will automatically grant them Consensus enterprise level account status from now until next year.\u00a0 If users have already created an account with their atu.edu email, users will see the premium icon in the bottom, left-corner of the Consensus homepage:<\/p>\n

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The current trial enables users to have unlimited Pro searches, unlimited Study Snapshots<\/a><\/strong>, and 50 Deep Searches<\/strong><\/a> a month.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Content Does Consensus Search?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Unlike general search engines like Google, Consensus will only search academic articles and peer-reviewed studies.\u00a0 It uses sources like Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Pubmed, and its own collections licensed through other academic publishers.\u00a0 Some of the results include preprint versions of articles before they were peer-reviewed and published elsewhere. According to their website<\/strong><\/a>, users can search over 220 million peer-reviewed articles. While most results will be comprised of open access content, it may also include articles with abstracts only or restricted access.\u00a0 These articles can be searched by title or DOI in the library\u2019s search engine<\/strong><\/a> for immediate full-text access or access through Interlibrary Loan.\u00a0 You can see some illustrations of their included content at their dashboard<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

How Do I Use It?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Like any search engine, the website features an open search box where users can query the database.\u00a0 It supports both semantic searching and structured, Boolean searching.\u00a0 A semantic search, like a whole phrase or question, searches for synonyms and contextual meaning rather than the exact search terms.\u00a0 A Boolean search will give you a more precise result set featuring articles using exact keywords, and the ability to recognize operators like AND, OR, and NOT, as well as quotation marks for phrase-searching.<\/p>\n

If you ask Consensus a \u201cYes\u201d or \u201cNo\u201d question, this will activate a meter which will synthesize results from the top 20 papers to provide an illustration of where academic consensus on your question would fall:<\/p>\n

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View their Best Practices page<\/a><\/strong> to get more out of your Consensus search.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Makes Consensus Different Than Other Academic Search Engines?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Like all academic search engines, Consensus uses search filters to help users refine results.\u00a0 It also ranks results by relevancy to your search query.\u00a0 It does have a few features that make it stand out:<\/p>\n