Exploring Scholar Labs, Google Scholar’s New AI-Powered Research Tool

With its launch in 2004, Google Scholar, a wide-ranging and relatively powerful search tool for discovering articles, books, legal decisions, patents, and other scholarly works upended the scholarly research process. Google recently provided a limited release to a companion product, Scholar Labs, which brings AI-powered search to research queries.[1] As it is rolled out more widely, it seems likely that Scholar Labs will continue in the tradition of upending scholarly research.

Since its early days, Google Scholar “delighted and infuriated in equal measure.”[2] It is now firmly entrenched in the scholarly research process, usurping the primacy of many fee-based databases both in terms of coverage and features.[3] There are scores of research-focused AI tools[4] but with Google’s wide reach and business model, Scholar Labs has the potential to continue Google Scholar’s legacy of disruption, and perhaps further delight and infuriate.

While Google Scholar’s search originally was based on Boolean or natural language, AI has recently been integrated, including in ordering results.[5] In contrast, Scholar Labs is fully AI-driven and takes plain language queries and works to identify primary and associated subjects and then provide the most relevant results.[6] The results include a sentence-long, AI-generated description of the article, focusing on how it relates to the query generally. Also included are two bullet points describing and linking the query to subjects associated with the search.

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Exploring Scholar Labs, Google Scholar’s New AI-Powered Research Tool