Journal Research/AI/Search Strategies

I would like to own some of the journals available in Verbum/Logos, but unfortunately for the moment they are out of reach from a budget perspective. I've been thinking about rigging together a poor man's version of a Verbum journal search that I could use to accompany my study.

So here is my scenario. This is personal bible study. I'm currently studying Jeremiah, and my main resources are commentaries on Lundbom, Thompson and St. Thomas Aquinas. I'm currently at Jeremiah 14, and I want to survey academic journals that might enrich my study. Here is my prompt:

Sample Prompt:

Summarize the latest academic research on [Insert Bible Text]. Be sure to concentrate especially on research appearing in the following academic journals: Journal of Biblical Literature, Bibliotheca Sacra, Biblical and Ancient Greek Linguistics, Filiologia Neotestementario, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, Tyndale Bulletin. Provide citations for all statements. Include at the end a list of relevant journal articles, with links to those articles where possible.

I tried this prompt out in (a) the AI search bar in Verbum; (b) Grok; © Perplexity; (d) Chat GPT; (e) Scholar GPT; and (f) Claude.

Here is my subjective grading of the results:

Chat GPT - Most helpful by far. Included helpful links to articles.
Scholar GPT - After my good experience with Chat GPT, I thought I would try this. Counterintuitively it was worse - from what I can tell the results are just a long hallucination.
Search Bar AI - It definitely didn't do what I asked, not referencing journal articles at all. The search results also don't reference journal articles. The discussion it did provide was pretty helpful, and made me want to purchase the Hermenia commentary!
Grok - Indicated it couldn't find anything in the relevant journals, but did provide a long discussion of its view of current research. Interesting but definitely a step down from Chat GPT.
Perplexity - Weird result. Prepared a discussion based on free commentaries on the internet, like K&D. But then gave me a good list of articles that appear to be relevant.
Claude - Ran a search and said it couldn't find anything, and gave me some explanations of why that was.

On the whole, the results were a very poor substitute for having journal articles available in the program. Chat GPT seemed head and shoulders above the rest, and did give me pdf links to a number of articles from Tyndale Bulletin and the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting all of this is to hopefully start a conversation about the search strategy. I'd love to hear any tips or tricks others have used to come up with better results in your own studies, or any critiques of my prompt.

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Comments

Steven Veach

Hey Rifhen,

I find this kind of inquiry interesting, so I gave it some test runs. Google AI returned some interesting summary information and gave me this list of journals to access:

Journal of Biblical Literature (Society of Biblical Literature)

Biblica (Pontifical Biblical Institute)

Vetus Testamentum (Brill)

Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (De Gruyter)

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (SAGE Publications)

The Catholic Biblical Quarterly (Catholic Biblical Association of America).

However, journals or articles could not be accessed directly because of copyright issues. Then I ran the same query in Logos > All Smart Search. It provided a detailed summary, with specific examples of journal articles and their citations. They were unavailable because I did not have them, but I bet I could access them directly if I did. The search results provide a few additional articles from academic journals, but nothing too substantial. I would have tried running it through Grammarly's AI chatbot, but I just noticed that it is gone!

Steven

Rifhen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1378692#Comment_1378692

Steven, that's interesting. Did you use the same search query as me? The reason I'm asking is that I've never been able to get the All Smart Search to come back with journal articles and their citations. That's been disappointing as searching the entire library was one of the things I thought might be very useful.

Steven Veach

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1378737#Comment_1378737

Hi Rifhen,

Yes, I used the same search query. It was not the best search result I've seen, but I tend to lean toward full books and commentaries instead of articles. Over the years, I've never been able to find very dependable access to articles, so I tend to only look for articles mentioned in books or online by name.

I do use the ALL search to find out what might be out there that I do not currently own and to use those sources in the summary, but most of the time, I end up back with a book search since I want to have access to whatever is brought up.

Steven