Keenious – An AI Search Engine

Since Keenious does not rely on search terms it can be useful if you have difficulty searching in traditional databases. It is also useful if you want to extend your search beyond those. However, you should not treat Keenious as an alternative but rather an addition to searching in databases or the library search service.  

Keenious is useful at least for the following purposes:

• Find ideas and learn new concepts. If you are new to a subject or unsure of what you want to write about searching in traditional databases can be challenging. Here Keenious can be a useful way to help find ideas to get started with an essay and learn new concepts.  
• Find similar and related articles. If you have found some useful sources already you can use Keenious to help you find related and similar articles.
• Search as you write. With the addon in Microsoft Word or Google Docs you can search for relevant articles while you are writing by using the Keenious sidebar. You can also highlight specific parts of your text to find relevant articles to that part of your text. 
• Extend your search and promote an interdisciplinary approach. Since Keenious has a huge scope, it can help you find articles that might not be included in the databases you normally search, especially if they are more subject specific databases. 
• Identify key research and researchers in a field. The number of times an article has been cited can be useful as a measure of an article's authority and importance within its field. Since Keenious rewards articles with many citations and also allows you to filter by citation count you can use it to find highly cited articles. However, articles can be cited frequently for other reasons than their academic merit. Also, citation count is affected by publication date, the prestige of the journal, and citation practices within a particular field.

• If transparency and replicability is key to your method Keenious is not suitable. Since Keenious uses an AI algorithm it is not possibly to explain exactly how Keenious searches. It is therefore not possible to search systematically in Keenious. Traditional academic databases give you much more control over your search and the possibility to document it.
• If you want to make an exhaustive search. Keenious is not designed for exhaustive searches where you aim to find all available research for a delimited research question. If your aim is to conduct an exhaustive search you should instead use traditional academic databases.

Keenious uses many different factors to predict and make recommendations. However, to simplify, there are four key factors that influence the ranking. 

1. Shared terms: Keenious takes into account the number of shared rare terms that are found in your text and in the titles and abstracts of the articles it recommends. 
2. Predicted meaning of your text: Keenious uses a language model to predict the meaning and topic of your text. This makes it possible to find articles that do not share many rare terms but are still relevant. It also helps prevent including articles that do share many rare terms but are still not relevant to you. 
3. Citation count: Keenious considers how many times an article has been cited in other articles ranking those with a high citation count higher. 
4. Publication date: More recent articles are given precedence. 
    

Since it is not possible to make the type of exhaustive database searches required in systematic reviews Keenious is not suitable for that part of the review process. However, it can still be useful at some parts of the process.

• Preliminary searches. Keenious can help you explore existing literature on the subject in the early stages of the process helping you examine the originality of your research question. Since Keenious analyses texts you can include detailed descriptions of your subject to examine if there are similar articles already published.  
• Formulating the search strategy. An essential part of forming a search strategy for a systematic review is to find all relevant search terms. Using Keenious can help you find alternative keywords and synonyms to add to your search strategy. 
• Additional searches. After you have screened the articles retrieved in your search in traditional academic databases you can transfer them to Keenious to see if Keenious might suggest articles that your database search potentially missed. 
   

You can find more instructions and answers to frequently asked question on Keenious’ website.

Keenious F&Q

You can also contact Keenious on their website if you have questions

Contact Keenious