2026-02-23: New | AI Research Assistant in our Discovery Service

From now on, UHasselt students and staff can use the Summon Research Assistant in our Discovery Service. This functionality is similar to AI tools for literature discovery such as Elicit and Perplexity, but it has an important advantage: the Research Assistant searches directly in Clarivate’s Central Discovery Index (CDI) - a broad index of reliable scholarly publications - whereas many other tools mainly rely on content that is freely available (open access).

How does it work?

• Off campus? Click on 'Summon research assistant' and sign in with your Google account. Also remember to log in (upper right corner) to get full text access and the most complete list of results.
• You ask a question or enter a short prompt (you cannot upload files).
• The Research Assistant then returns a top 5 of relevant sources within the CDI including a short summary with references to the sources used and suggestions for related questions or follow-up searches.

More information about using the Research Assistant is available on the Clarivate website.

Why is this useful?

A major benefit is that you can click through from the results to the 'regular' Discovery interface (select 'View related results'). There you can:

• limit your search to UHasselt’s own collection (deselect 'Add results beyond the UHasselt collection');
• view the AI-generated query that was used.

This makes the tool useful not only for quickly exploring the literature, but also as a way to build effective search strings/queries for more traditional searches.

Privacy & data processing

The Research Assistant works based on your prompt (no uploads). More details about privacy and data processing can be found in Clarivate’s product information.