High-redshift quasars are currently the only probes of the growth of supermassive black holes and potential tracers of structure evolution at early cosmic time .
Here we present our candidate selection criteria from the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System 1 and follow-up strategy to discover quasars in the redshift range 5.7 \lesssim z \lesssim 6.2 .
With this strategy we discovered eight new 5.7 \leq z \leq 6.0 quasars , increasing the number of known quasars at z > 5.7 by more than 10 % .
We additionally recovered 18 previously known quasars .
The eight quasars presented here span a large range of luminosities ( -27.3 \leq M _ { 1450 } \leq - 25.4 ; 19.6 \leq z _ { P 1 } \leq 21.2 ) and are remarkably heterogeneous in their spectral features : half of them show bright emission lines whereas the other half show a weak or no Ly \alpha emission line ( 25 % with rest-frame equivalent width of the Ly \alpha + N v line lower than 15Å ) .
We find a larger fraction of weak-line emission quasars than in lower redshift studies .
This may imply that the weak-line quasar population at the highest redshifts could be more abundant than previously thought .
However , larger samples of quasars are needed to increase the statistical significance of this finding .