Speaker 1: If you are an independent scholar like me or are based in a developing nation or even work for a small university in the United States, chances are you do not have access to expensive databases in your field of study. I'm here to introduce you today to Consensys, an affordable, powerful, new search engine. So let's explore it a little bit. So Consensys is an AI-powered search engine and it can perform various research functions for you and it's highly affordable. In today's video I will first introduce Consensys and then show you how to do a search on it and a few other of its functions. Now for full disclosure, this is a sponsored video and I'm being compensated for reviewing Consensys, but I have not been asked to uncritically recommend it. My recommendations are based in my testing and trial of the search engine. Now please stay and watch until the end so that you can learn how to use Consensys, but also maybe more importantly I'll be sharing a discount code towards the end of the video which will give you a 40% discount on the premium plan for Consensys. So let's explore Consensys, but before I do that let me share some of the things that I know about it and why it's important to have a search engine like Consensys. I think the most important thing that something such as this search engine Consensys does is it democratizes knowledge and makes it affordable. Now I say this based on my personal experience. When I worked for a research university I was the chair of the library board and one of the biggest expenses that the library had was every year setting aside money to pay for the databases that we absolutely needed to have. That is when we learned to our horror that six large corporations in the world own all of peer-reviewed published knowledge and they were so powerful that every year they will escalate the rate 8% minimum and they would not negotiate with you because they knew that the universities had to have those databases to keep their research going and for accreditation purposes. The sad part of it is that most of that research was given to the journals from which these huge companies had bought the knowledge freely. Sometimes the science authors actually even pay a subvention fee. So within that scenario when someone like me leaves a research universities and you are used to using these expensive databases how do you conduct your research? For me mostly I've been relying on the books that I could buy, the online sources that I could access and Google Scholar. Now what Consensys does is it uses AI but it's different from other AI search engines. It so far has access to more than 200 million peer-reviewed published papers. So when we search on Consensys then unlike other AI search products Consensys' search engine draws its information from peer-reviewed research. Now this is something which usually is only available to people who work at research universities. It makes it affordable. Now I still think that the price could be steep for someone who is not living in the developed world right but making it possible for us to individually purchase access to peer-reviewed research I think is a path to the right kind of knowledge availability in the world. Now as I said towards the end of this video I'll be sharing a discount code which if you use you will get a 40% discount on I think a one-year subscription to Consensys. Now please bear in mind I do not get a commission if you purchase access to Consensys. Now let's go into and see how does the interface look like and what can you do with it. There are two things that I'll be explaining. I'll be explaining one how to conduct a general search and two how to create a draft of a literature review but I will have some qualifications about the second towards the end of this video. So let's go and see how the interface works. Okay so when you go to the Consensys website and I'll post the link in the description this is the interface you get. You get a search bar which has synthesize and co-pilot at the bottom and I'll explain what those do. But basically you start your research by asking a question. Now Consensys is built around asking yes and no questions. That means that the synthesize function is if you ask a yes and no question in any field of study right let's say do vitamins help or health. It will pull resources from medical journals but then it will also give you a consensus how many percentage of papers are in favor of your question how many oppose it right. So that's why it's called Consensys. It gives us a scientific consensus and gives us a consensus meter. So let's do a yes and no search right do so my question is do vitamins help with heart diseases. Let's see what it gives us. Okay so if you see on the left we get a summary. Now this summary is built around the resources from which Consensys has pulled this knowledge. On the right is the consensus meter. Okay now it tells us 31% of the research that the search engine consulted says yes vitamins help. Possibly 25% of the research. 44% of the research suggests that no they don't have a significant impact on our health. Our question was do vitamins help with heart diseases. So this is an example of when you can ask a yes and no question and then if you scroll down it will summarize the research for you. It will give you the key insights and a conclusion and then it will list the journal articles that it has pulled the information from. Now this alone is a powerful powerful resource. Even when I was at a research university in humanities I could not get this granular answer to my questions. But since my audience is mostly humanities let's also do a search which is not a yes and no question and which is about let's say research in humanities. What are some major themes in Things Fall Apart which is of course Chinua Achebe's famous novel. So it has no consensus meter because our question wasn't yes or no question but you get a summary right and then you get a summary of key themes major themes right below right and then you get different articles and that's where the detail is. For example if you look at this article we know where it was published International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research. It doesn't have any citations and it was published in 2023 right. Now if you want to see the details about the study, a snapshot usually gives you the details like if you are in social sciences it will give you the details of whether it was a controlled study, whether it was you know a study based in humans, all of those details you'll get from study snapshot. But you can also add filters in your search. So if you look here the filters include you can you can choose from which year to which year, you can choose how many citations, what research method was used, you can name journals, you can even put a filter for country right. So these are all the filters that you can use before you even start yours. So that was about how to conduct basic research using consensus. Let us see how it performs when we ask it to compose a literature review for us. Okay so you can also ask the search engine to write a literature review for you. As I said I'll have more detailed opinions about whether or not it's advisable or not but let me first show you its capabilities. So you simply ask it a question or you tell it write a literature review for themes in Things Fall Apart. So right now you can see that it has analyzed 10 papers and it has given you a draft of a literature review and it will give you citations in text as to where that information is coming from right. And then at the bottom full citations of each 10 papers that it has pulled from, it will give you the details of those. It can pull from up to 20 papers for a literature review. Now this is just to show you the process of how it does that. Now if you need additional information about any of these things, if you go to the bottom of the website, I mean if my video doesn't cover anything, you can just click on how to search and they will show you what best practices are there and how best to conduct a search. As you just saw in my brief demonstration, it's a powerful academic search engine and you can give it your search parameters. You can even add filter and then it will pull up out of all the resources that are available to consensus at this point millions of papers, peer-reviewed papers and that is likely to increase. And then under certain circumstances you can also ask it to write a draft of your literature review. Now as far as the search is concerned, I say it's really a powerful academic search engine and especially if you're like me and do not have access to a research library or if you are an independent scholar or a student even in a high school and your school usually here high schools don't even have libraries anymore, this could be something that puts a powerful search engine in your pocket. If you are in the developing world, I'm originally from Pakistan, such databases are really really rarely available at universities and with a little bit of investment you could have access to some of the finest peer-reviewed research no matter which field of study you are in and I think consensus as an academic search engine does that for all of us. Now a bit of a cautionary note from me as a scholar, you can use consensus to write your literature review, a draft of it, but remember literature review isn't just a review of articles that you have found online. Literature review is based in you having read all the materials that's why you are giving a review of them and then your research either builds on that review or finds a gap in the research and builds on that. So if you ask consensus to write a literature review without having read or without having researched, then you're neither learning anything new nor producing anything new in the research world. That is what I would consider a lazy kind of scholarship. I do not recommend it. However, if you use it to generate a list of articles which you ought to read or ought to have read, I think that's a fair use of this software and this search engine. So that's my cautionary note about asking any AI, even consensus, to write something for you because I think writing is where your own originality and your style must show and you cannot ask a machine, doesn't matter how powerful, to do that work for you. But as far as search is concerned, looking up sources, filtering sources according to the kind of study, the area, the years, I think consensus is a powerful search engine and it is likely to make a huge impact in my life as a scholar but also in the lives of so many others who may not have access to expensive databases made available by research universities. Now, as I promised, that there will be a code for you to use. The code is my name, Masood, all caps, Masood Fodi. So you can sign up with a free account. When you go to upgrade and you click on that, it will ask you for a code. Just put Masood Fodi and you will get a 40% discount on your subscription. That's all I have. Thank you so much. I hope this was useful to you. Let me know what you think. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer those. Also, please do take a few moments to subscribe to the channel so that you get timely notifications of new content. And I am, as always, grateful for your support. Thank you for your time. Stay safe, take care, and I'll see you next time. Until then, peace and love.