Off-shell Bethe vectors and Drinfeld currents

In this paper we compare two constructions of weight functions (off-shell Bethe vectors) for the quantum affine algebra $U_q(\hat{\mathfrak{gl}}_N)$. The first construction comes from the algebraic nested Bethe ansatz. The second one is defined in terms of certain projections of products of Drinfeld currents. We show that two constructions give the same result in tensor products of vector representations of $U_q(\hat{\mathfrak{gl}}_N)$.