Google has launched Google Scholar Labs, a new AI-powered research tool designed to transform the process of answering detailed scholarly research questions. The search giant said that the AI acts as an advanced research tool, which helps to answer questions that require looking at subjects from multiple angles.
The tool follows a multiple step process after asking your query. First, it analyzes your question to identify key topics, aspects, and relationships. It then searches for all identified elements on Google Scholar before evaluating the search results. It then identifies papers that answer the overall research question and explains how each identified paper addresses the question.
Right now, Google Scholar Labs is available to a limited number of logged-in users. You can head over to the Scholar Labs website now and join a waitlist, but it is no guarantee that you will get access.
For those who have not got access yet, you can check out a few examples on the Google Scholar Labs website to see how results look. Essentially, the AI is ranking the papers in a different order to the normal Google Scholar and providing a summary of insights related to your question underneath the paper.
Using artificial intelligence to assess scientific papers is not new and there are several tools available you can use today to do this. Ai2 (Allen AI) is one of the leaders in this field, it has developed Semantic Scholar which is similar to Google Scholar and it has a full-on AI research assistant called ASTA which checks research papers and crafts a full answer.
The improvements to Google Scholar were made at the same time that the company unveiled Gemini 3.0 and upgrades to the AI in Google Search. The company is also taking on Visual Studio Code with the interestingly named Google Antigravity IDE.