Maximize Your Consensus Experience With These Best Practices
Consensus is an AI-powered search engine for research papers. Every insight or answer that we surface will always be tied back to an actual research paper because our product is a search engine first.
It is important to know that Consensus is not a chatbot.
Consensus is designed to take in research queries, find relevant insights within research papers, and synthesize these insights using the power of large language models.
We hope this article will help improve your experience and we can’t wait to keep improving Consensus for you…
Focus on the Right Subject Matter:
Consensus only searches through peer-reviewed scientific research articles to find the most credible insights to your queries. We recommend focusing on topics that have likely been studied by researchers.
Consensus has subject matter coverage that ranges from medical research and physics to social sciences and economics.
Examples of queries that perform well and have loads of relevant research include:
- What are the benefits of mindfulness meditation?
- Does spanking impact childhood development?
- Does immigration increase unemployment? group together the pro and con cases for each argument
- Write a paragraph about the best treatment for restless leg syndrome?
- Does NO3 improve exercise performance?
- What predicts success for a start-up founder?
- Find me ten papers about the impact of early pandemic warning systems
- Is creatine safe?
- Review the literature on the relationship between socioeconomic factors and healthcare outcomes in America
- Do direct cash transfers reduce poverty?
Consensus is NOT meant to be used to ask questions about basic facts such as: “How many people live in Europe?” or “When is the next leap year?” as there would likely not be research dedicated to investigating these subjects.
Follow Recommended Formats for Your Query:
There is no “correct” way to structure a Consensus query, however we typically see the best results from asking research questions, asking ‘question-adjacent’ phrases (think like ‘effects of x on y’) and inputting simple conversational commands.
Here are some successful and recommended query formats
- Ask a yes/no questions:
- Ask about the relationship between concepts or the effects/impact of a concept:
- Input a simple conversational command (with Copilot switched on):
- Input an “open-ended phrase” about your subject of interest:
- Ask a research question, tack on a simple command with it (with Copilot switched on)::
Other query formats that can produce strong results but have some limitations include:
- Two concepts separated by an “and”:
- Zinc and depression
- Limitation: you are missing out on all our neat synthesize features and our models won’t be as accurate in parsing your intent!
- Ask about “what is the best…”
- What is the best treatment for restless leg syndrome?
- Limitation: most research papers aren’t written like this, so you will usually just get a list of possible best options
- Ask a question about “how to” do something
- How do you increase local voter turnout?
- Limitation: similar to the above, most research papers aren’t written like this, so you will usually just get a list of possible methods
- Keyword searching:
- Fructose consumption
- Limitation: you are missing out on all our neat synthesize features and our models won’t be as accurate in parsing your intent!
- Long “chat-like” commands:
- Write a detailed thesis on the topic: ease of intubation through Blockbuster Laryngeal Mask Airway in patients with simulated Cervical spine injury. Include sections like: aim, objectives, study area, study population, inclusion criteria, exclusion criteria, sample size
- Limitation: when using Consensus, we always start with a search of the literature to ground all of our responses in scientific studies. The longer the command the more challenging it will be to find relevant papers to cite in our response!
Still have questions?
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