The conversational AI-powered chatbots that have come to Internet search engines, such as Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing, look increasingly set to change scientific search too. On 1 August, Dutch publishing giant Elsevier released a ChatGPT-powered AI interface for some users of its Scopus database, while British firm Digital Science announced a closed trial of an AI large language model (LLM) assistant for its Dimensions database. Meanwhile, US firm Clarivate says it’s also working on bringing LLMs to its Web of Science database.
LLMs for scientific search aren’t new: start-up firms such as Elicit, Scite, and Consensus already have such AI systems, which help to summarize a field’s findings or identify top studies, relying on free science databases or (in Scite’s case) access to paywalled research articles through partnerships with publishers. But firms who own large proprietary databases of scientific abstracts and references are now joining the AI rush.
Elsevier’s chatbot, called Scopus AI and launched as a pilot, is intended as a light, playful tool to help researchers quickly get summaries of research topics they’re unfamiliar with, says Maxim Khan, an Elsevier executive in London who oversaw the tool’s development. In response to a natural-language question, the bot uses a version of the LLM GPT-3.5 to return a fluent summary paragraph about a research topic, together with cited references, and further questions to explore.
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