# About Searchlight Advanced

In Searchlight Basic you started to learn searching for reliable information. As you know, this is essential to substantiate your product.

Searchlight Advanced takes you a step further and is aimed at student from the second year onwards.
In this course, you will learn:

- what the best steps are for finding the right information
- ways of thinking up useful search terms
- how to use a number of internet resources and databases
- how to evaluate the information you find
- how to incorporate this information correctly into your reports

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Searching for literature is an essential part of doing research. But why is that? When should you do it? And, how about the theoretical framework? This is explained in this video.

https://vimeo.com/277089585?fl=pl&fe=sh

The role of GenAI
In the video above, you saw why you use literature for your research, and in which phases of your research you do so. You use literature in several phases of your research: at the beginning, to get a clear picture of your research scope and to find out which research questions you can ask; but also later on, to study the results and methods of previous relevant studies and to describe which concepts are addressed in your research.

Could this also be done by using AI? Partly yes, partly no. With AI, you usually ask for answers, instead of for the sources in which those answers can be found. This quickly creates the impression that those answers are within easy reach. Often, this is just an illusion. Many good sources are not accessible to AI: you will often only find relevant professional and scholarly literature on the bookshelf or in paid databases. Chatbots cannot access these. Especially when you want to get a good overview of different opinions and perspectives, the reach of AI will soon fall short. After all, you want access to the sources themselves instead of bare references to them.

So, should you not use AI at all? You certainly can use AI to explore your topic, or to ask about important authors or publications in your field. But for the sources themselves, you will often have to use other methods as well.