## The role of GenAI

When choosing the right websites or databases, chatbots can be helpful. For example, you can ask a chatbot for a suitable database for legal information, or for public websites of knowledge centers in the field of social work. There is, however, a “but” …

The range of paid-for databases differs per university of applied sciences, and information about this will often be missing from chatbots. It is better to look for suitable databases on the library’s website. A chatbot can then help you to quickly get an explanation of how a database works. Be careful though: the information you get from a chatbot is sometimes not up to date.

You can also use chatbots to search directly for relevant books or articles for your research. However, chatbots do not have access to paid-for databases. The overview you get therefore does not necessarily give a good picture of the range of articles on your topic, let alone that you have full access to those sources. In addition, you must remain alert to hallucinations: do the sources that the chatbot presents to you actually exist? So do this preferably as a supplement to – and not as a replacement for – catalogues and databases. You can find the latter via the library.