The Summary feature is designed to help you quickly understand complex research topics by providing concise, an AI-generated summary of your query. Instead of sifting through lengthy studies, this feature gives you the main takeaways in seconds, making research more efficient and accessible.
When you enter a search, your query is searched through more than 200 million research papers to find relevant information. If there is enough data available, a summary will be generated from the top 5-10 papers into a 1-sentenece snippet. All sources are listed directed below for easy reference. Read the summary for a quick understanding, or explore the full list of sources for deeper insights.
Generate a Summary by clicking the link below:
How to use the Summary feature
Sign in to your Consensus account.
Submit a query into the search bar
Make sure the Pro switch is turned off.
If Pro is turn on, you will only receive a Pro Analysis answer
See the Summary right above the results
Guardrails and Limitations
We are as excited as anybody about the future of the AI-powered information space. However, we also want to ensure that the powerful features we release are built thoughtfully, ethically, and with guardrails in place to further assist in delivering good information.
Here are a few ways that we are trying to put guardrails on our summary feature:
No black boxes – all the results that power the summary can be seen directly below its interface. Our model is explicitly instructed to only include information from these results in the summary output.
Our underlying results are extracted, not generated – most LLM-powered products are fully generative, meaning the AI is creating all of the text. Unfortunately, these models sometimes outright hallucinate. To help mitigate this, the results that power the generative summary are all extracted word-for-word quotes from papers.
Relevancy and confidence thresholding – if our models do not think the results are relevant enough to answer your question, we will exclude them from our analysis.
A few limitations to call out:
Research quality is not a part of the analysis – a limitation that we cannot wait to address! Currently, each claim counts the same toward the summary regardless if it comes from a meta-analysis or an n = 1 case report. Not all research is created equal and future versions of this feature will take into account both paper and journal quality. Remember, sometimes the most relevant answers come from junk research.
The summary is only as good as our search logic – the summary feature synthesizes the top 5 to 10 results that we surface. There will be times where the summary does not answer your question particularly well but the summary actually did what it was “supposed to do” – our search models just did not do a good job surfacing claims that answered your research question
We do not have access to all research – the Consensus database includes north of 150 million peer-reviewed papers. While this represents significant coverage, there is plenty of amazing research that we do have access to. The summary is just a snapshot of some of the relevant research that we have access to, not a fully-comprehensive look into all of the research regarding your question
Hallucinations can occur – based on our testing, GPT-4, when given the right instructions, is significantly less prone to generating content that does not represent the underlying source material than previous iterations. However, anytime a generative model is being used, there is the possibility of it creating an answer that is not based on reality. Always read the papers that power the summary when coming to a final answer to your question!
Troubleshooting
Why doesn’t the summary feature appear for some searches?
The summary feature only appears if...
The Pro feature is turned OFF
The search results are relevant enough to provide a coherent summary. If the results are too broad, it won’t generate a summary to maintain accuracy. Try to broaden your search topic and try again
If you have any questions or run into issues, feel free to reach out to our support team via the in-product Support Chat or at [email protected]. We’re here to help!