UPADTE: Aaron Tay takes Scholar Labs for a spin in this Substack post.
—–End Update—–
If you’ve been wondering if or when Google would begin offering AI technology with Google Scholar, so have we.
As of this hour (1pm EST) you don’t have to wonder any longer.
A new experimental feature (as of today available to a limited number of logged-in users, waitlist for others…including me), Scholar Labs, is now live. Details below.
Does Google Scholar do it better or differently than similar tools? Stay tuned.
Regardless, for many people Google Scholar is the one and only academic research tool they’re aware and they use so for that reason alone today’s release is worthy of our attention.
Final note: At the bottom of this post we also provide links to the Asta ecosystem of AI-powered research tools from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), the group that gives us Semantic Scholar.
Today, we are introducing Google Scholar Labs, a new feature that explores how generative AI can transform the process of answering detailed scholarly research questions. Scholar Labs is powered by AI to act as an advanced research tool, helping you tackle questions that require looking at a subject from multiple angles. For each paper, it explains how the paper answers your question. And includes all the familiar Scholar features that you depend upon.
It analyzes your question to identify key topics, aspects and relationships, then searches all of them on Scholar. For example, let’s say you’re looking to find out how caffeine consumption might affect short-term memory. Scholar Labs could look for papers that cover the relationships between caffeine intake, short-term memory retention and age-specific cognitive studies to gather the most relevant papers. After evaluating the results, it identifies papers that answer your overall research question, explaining how each paper addresses it.
Scholar Labs currently supports questions in English.
Scholar Labs is an experimental feature and will be available to a limited number of logged in users as of today. We hope to expand that going forward . This is a new direction for us and we plan to use the experience and feedback to improve the service. If Scholar Labs is not yet available for you, you can register to be notified [waitlist] when it is.
A Few More Notes (via a Google Scholar Spokesperson)
“The explanation of how a paper answers the question is from the fulltext of the article if available.”
“Each result links to and mentions the site just like Scholar search. So you can easily see if it is from arxiv.org, biorxiv.org or a similar preprint site or from a publisher site.”
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) offers two resources (branded as “Asta”) that utilize the Semantic Scholar database of research papers. One resource uses AI to help with research paper discovery while the other responds with a traditional response using the paper. They’re both free to access and use. Learn more in this blog post about Asta.
UPDATE: Is it Google Scholar Labs or Scholar Labs? The original news release we were sent (below) says Google Scholar Labs but the blog post shows Scholar Labs. We’ve recast the title of this post to Scholar Labs.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) offers two resources (branded as “Asta”) that utilize the Semantic Scholar database of research papers. One resource uses AI to help with research paper discovery while the other responds with a traditional response using the paper. They’re both free to access and use. Learn more in this blog post about Asta.
