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Audit AI search tools now, before they skew research

Generative AI could be a boon for literature search, but only if independent groups scrutinize its biases and limitations.
By
  1. Michael Gusenbauer

    1. Michael Gusenbauer is a researcher at the Institute of Innovation Management at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and the founder of Search Smart.

Search tools assisted by large language models (LLMs) are changing how researchers find scholarly information. One tool, scite Assistant, uses GPT-3.5 to generate answers from a database of millions of scientific papers. Another, Elicit, uses an LLM to write its answers to searches for articles in a scholarly database. Consensus finds and synthesizes research claims in papers, whereas SciSpace bills itself as an ‘AI research assistant’ that can explain mathematics or text contained in scientific papers. All of these tools give natural-language answers to natural-language queries.

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Nature 617, 439 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01613-w

Competing Interests

M.G. is the founder of Smart Search, a free website that tests academic search systems.

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