Elsevier launches Scopus AI bot for literature reviews

Elsevier has launched a generative artificial intelligence tool that provides summaries of research from more than 27,000 scholarly journals.

Announcing its Scopus AI service on 16 January, the world’s largest academic publisher said the AI-generated summaries would give “fast overviews of key topics” to researchers to allow them to “dig deeper into, sometimes even highlighting gaps in literature”.

The tool covers work from more than 17 million authors who have produced work for more than 7,000 publishers worldwide, whose content is vetted by an independent board of scientists and university librarians, Elsevier said.

The public offering of Scopus AI follows its alpha launch in August 2023, since which thousands of researchers across the world have tested the service and given feedback.

This feedback has led to the creation of several new features, such as the ability to pinpoint “foundational and influential papers” within a field that could be regarded as seminal works, or those outputs that show significant impact or represent academic progress, said Elsevier.

There is also an “academic expert search” which identifies leading experts in their fields and provides explanations of their expertise relevant to the user’s query, and “expanded and enhanced summaries” that give overviews of key topics.

According to Elsevier, the use of its trusted content would help minimise the risk of “hallucinations” – or false AI-generated information – which are often caused by the technology accessing unverified internet pages.

Maxim Khan, senior vice-president of analytics products and data platform at Elsevier, said the service was “built on trusted knowledge and data that will help accelerate understanding of new research topics, provide deeper research insights, identify relevant research and experts in a particular field, all with the aim of paving the way for academic success”.

Elisenda Aguilera, a researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain who has taken part in Scopus AI testing, said the AI tool would “allow the researcher to obtain an overview of a problem, as well as identify authors and approaches, in a more agile search session than conventional search”.

“It is a valuable tool for literature reviews, construction of theoretical frameworks and verification of relationships between variables, among other applications that are actually impossible to delimit,” she added.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com

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